Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?

This is how I learned to love.
In bits and pieces,
mostly weekdays,
weeknights,
weak nights,
powerless over my own desire.
You were entirely inconsistent,
nothing at all like nature,
no rhyme nor reason, no seasons.
Nothing at all like me,
tied to the earth as I was,
slave to my own base biology –

But not only that. I knew
other carnality, the awkward ecstasy
of teenaged boys and their quivering hands.
But it was you who taught me to love.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy…
It could not envy, it had no claim on you,
you, crackling across the night sky,
impossible to grab as lightning,
(and so maybe a little like nature after all).

I loved you from the margins, never out loud,
only secretly, beneath or beyond my own admission.
Only in seedy motels and midnight parking lots and
amphitheaters in frigid weather,
fumbling to zip our jackets together, to share a skin.
I loved you with no logic or sense,
as though I were born to it,
a monarch winging across the Great Lakes
with no land in sight, nowhere to alight,
programmed by nature for some unknown end.