You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
SYLVIA PLATH
Cardinal Points
At twelve, I believed
in the glamour
of winter. I wished for it.
“The north,”
is how we thought.
In a Dublin rooming house,
scarves, gloves, hot water bottles,
padded to the bone,
I read books in a fever.
Now I'm riddled
with the coming
of winter. The south is a
getaway to stir
our drugged marriage.
The plot creaks,
the books by my bedside
are props.
ELIZABETH ASH VÉLEZ
Hazel Tells LaVerne
last night
im cleaning out my
howard johnsons ladies room
when all of a sudden
up pops this frog
musta come from the sewer
swimming aroun an tryin ta
climb up the sida the bowl
so i goes to flushm down
but sohelpmegod he starts talkin
bout a golden ball
an how i can be a princess
me a princess
well my mouth drops
all the way to the floor
an he says
kiss me just kiss me
once on the nose
well i screams
ya little green pervert
an i hitsm with my mop
an has ta flush
the toilet down three times
me
a princess
KATHARYN HOWDMACHAN
Finding Is the First Act
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The “Golden Fleece,”
Fourth, no Discovery,
Fifth, no crew,
Finally, no Golden Fleece
Jason—sham—too.
EMILY DICKINSON
Sex
When I came home from school and told my mother
I was surprised she had even heard
of anything so disgusting.
She sat me in the kitchen and explained that fucking
was the closest a man and a woman could get
to wanting the same thing at the same time
and one day, when I was older, I would understand
that this was love.
KATE BINGHAM
Knowledge
Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—
I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
LOUISE BOGAN
Broken-Off Twig Budding Out in the Path
Only the slightest thaw,
and something plops
in the water that clears.
It may be nothing
that swims,
nothing that hops, or hopes.
Edge-ice falling in.
Something that happens
and simply stops.
Or it may be a thing
like this stick—
its red buds swelling out
in spite of what it
ought to know,
in spite of where it ought to be.
Some quickened water sprout,
separate
beyond naming in its early spring.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
W
HEN
L
OVE
S
HINES
T
he clarity stage of love is such a relief. Finally, you get to step back and look at your relationship with fresh eyes. Whatever was making you demented—the boredom (Can you survive a lifetime of dinner on the couch while watching
Seinfeld
reruns?), the doubts (Are you still in love or just biding time?), the pain (Should you jump off a cliff or push his cheating ass off first?)—suddenly starts to make sense. You feel confident, prepared, ready to make a clean break or recommit yourself to your relationship. Sanity! At last!
We all hope to find ourselves in clarity at some point—the trick is getting there. Usually you need time, experience, supportive friends, and a wizard of a therapist. But sometimes just a flash of insight or a spark of wisdom can help change the way you see everything. That's what the love poems in this chapter offer: little moments of revelation to help you see your relationship—and yourself—more clearly.
In fact, that's where clarity seems to start, when you allow yourself to shift your perspective, to change your point of view. After a frustrating stretch of bad love, it's tough to put forth the effort. But look to the speaker in James Wright's “Mary Bly” for inspiration. “I sit here, doing nothing, alone, worn out by long winter,” he begins. Then slowly he starts noticing the newborn baby, from her “light breath” to her face “smooth as the side of an apricot.” Suddenly, as he watches the baby's “delicate hands/weave back and forth,” he feels “the seasons changing beneath [him].” The winter starts to thaw in him, and he sees the possibility of new beginnings, new joy. Where he was listless before, now he is fanciful, imagining the baby's hands “braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes/of happy colts” who “canter, without making a sound, along the shores/of melting snow.”
That kind of transformation is possible in clarity, if you're open to working at it. You may think your relationship is beyond repair, but then you see your partner in a new light, or you reconsider your own tough-to-live-with personality. If you try, like the speaker in William Carlos Willams 's “The Ivy Crown,” to look back at the “sorry facts” of your relationship and see roses instead of thorns, you just might find yourself back in love again. All it takes to survive in love, he says, is a little imagination and a whole lot of will. It doesn't mean you have to delude yourself about the truth. You can still say with complete honesty, “Sure / love is cruel / and selfish / and totally obtuse.” But at the same time you can believe that the love you share with your partner is a “jeweled prize.”
Again, it's all about perspective. Yes, love can be a jeweled prize, but you work damn hard to win it. So if you do decide in clarity to make love work again, don't downplay the enormousness of the undertaking. Give yourself a little credit, pat yourself on the back when you can, and realize you're not alone in your struggle to keep love alive—you're taking on one of humankind's oldest and biggest challenges, according to Margaret Atwood's “Habitation.” Long-term commitment, marriage in particular, is a primitive exercise, like “learning to make fire,” says the speaker. At least we're trying to warm ourselves, and at least we're learning together, but still, we evolve in love “painfully and with wonder/at having survived even/this far.”
And if you find in clarity that you need to let go of an old love, don't feel that you've failed—loss is a necessary part of evolution. The relationship may not have survived, but you have. Now you need to prepare your heart to move on, so you can learn to love again. That means taking a last hard look at what you had, then letting yourself feel whatever grief or regret remains. The wistful speaker in Frank O'Hara's “Animals” wishes his relationship could have stayed as perfect as it once was; he declares, “I wouldn't want to be faster/or greener than now if you were with me O you/were the best of all my days.” And even though the logical speaker in Louise Glück's “Earthly Love” realizes that her shattered relationship was a “deception” and a series of errors, she still says she would do it all again, because within it “true happiness occurred.”
But you can't linger too long in the past, searching for clarity, or you'll never move forward. In James Wright's “The Journey,” the speaker, taking a walk on a windy day, finds himself covered in dust, rather the way you might feel after you've just come out of a long-term relationship, when you can't quite shake off the past. The speaker pauses to wash off his face (to find a little clarity, we might say) and notices a spider web “whose hinges/reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,/Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging” (a perfect metaphor for what your old relationship looks like). As he watches, the spider herself appears, “slender and fastidious, the golden hair/of daylight along her shoulders.” He is amazed to find the spider “Free of the dust, as though a moment before/She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.” And then the speaker experiences a flash of insight—this is the way to move forward in love and in life. Don't let yourself get buried in the remains of your past; instead, let your old experiences baptize you into a new beginning. Try to emerge into “the heart of the light” of the present. “The secret of this journey,” he tells us, is “to step lightly, lightly/All the way through your ruins, and not to lose/Any sleep over the dead, who surely/Will bury their own, don't worry.”
It sounds harsh perhaps, letting go so completely of those in the past, but it's not as if we pretend the relationship never happened. You learned and changed and grew in your old relationship—those experiences will always be with you, shaping who you will become. The speaker in Jane Hirshfield's “Three Times My Life Has Opened” explains it this way: “There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light/stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor.” That slip of light, like the heart of the light in Wright's poem, can help guide you toward love again.
And being diehard romantics despite our efforts to appear jaded and cynical, we hope that clarity does find you back in love or on your way there again. We hope you share the contentment of the speaker in Amy Lowell's “Decade,” who, ten years into her relationship, feels that her mate leaves her “completely nourished.”
Actually, we hope for even more than that. Yes, it's very nice if your partner is like your “morning bread,” “smooth and pleasant.” It's very “Stability,” and stability is a fine place to be in love. But hey, come on, if he used to burn your mouth with his sweetness, if he used to taste like “red wine and honey,” well, wouldn't it be great to be nourished
and
to have all that rich flavor bursting back?
Wouldn't it be even more wonderful to have that contented nourishment
and
the naughty, teasing, hungry deliciousness described in William Carlos Williams's “This Is Just to Say”? The speaker in that poem willy-nilly dares to eat his lover's luscious plums, even though he knows she is saving them for something practical, like breakfast. He doesn't care. He can't help himself. He wants those sweet, cold plums! (which, in case you can't tell, we think symbolize his lover's sexuality). And he knows she'll be charmed by his funny, careless “this is just to say” approach. This is the kind of mate we want after a decade (or longer, or less) of long-term commitment—someone who knows and cares for us intimately but not solemnly, someone who still remembers how to be playfully provocative.
Yes, we're venturing back into ecstasy territory; we know it. Like the speaker in the Williams poem, we just can't help it. We want everyone to be happy in love, despite all its ups and downs or maybe even because of them. Real love can whirl you from the glory of ecstasy into the hell of misery and back again, but that's just how it goes in real life, and aren't we lucky to be part of that dance?
So as you emerge from clarity, no matter where your heart is headed next, be grateful for the chance to love. As Wallace Stevens seems to be saying in his poem “Life Is Motion,” love gives life momentum, helps us move forward, and allows us to be both flesh and air—to be physically grounded on earth but emotionally lifted to the heavens. So get crazy in love. Let yourself swing around like Bonnie and Josie in Stevens's poem, crying, “‘Ohoyaho,/Ohoo’…/ Celebrating the marriage/Of flesh and air.”
Mary Bly
I sit here, doing nothing, alone, worn out by long winter.
I feel the light breath of the newborn child.
Her face is smooth as the side of an apricot,
Eyes quick as her blond mother's hands.
She has full, soft, red hair, and as she lies quiet
In her tall mother's arms, her delicate hands
Weave back and forth.
I feel the seasons changing beneath me,
Under the floor.
She is braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes
Of happy colts.
They canter, without making a sound, along the shores
Of melting snow.
JAMES WRIGHT
Excerpt from “The Ivy Crown”
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Habitation
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
MARGARET ATWOOD
Animals
Have you forgotten what we were like then