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I really sometimes wonder if I love right, love correctly, or if I love at all and am not just miming what I think, what I want, I feel. For me I love all at once, I fall very fast, but rarely. I will go long loveless periods through life, happy and unthinking of what passions I am missing, unenvious of people paired in love, like a bright new boat at sea not thinking at all of the harbor. And suddenly in a lightning flash (un coup de foudre), I am whipped up into a maelstrom of passion and anguish. I am battered on all sides, forced always to maneuver at the helm and can think of nothing else, whatever. I am tormented in waiting out the storm, waiting for the dawn, the exchanged "I love you" or just a sign or symbol of reciprocation. I wait by the telephone, always checking messages, or finding myself reading through old messages. I am mad in love, always. But I think it may be better to be mad than never to feel that madness ever, always to love on a level plane.
What I love in poetry is that it is always, when done right, an attempt at saying what can never be said. Death, love, grief, loss, these things are common material, for what truths can ever be said in language about them? We all feel them every day, but words diminish them. To Love is golden in all its glister, but to speak of love is only to wear gawdy jewelry, paste diamonds and pyrite. It is a poor imitation to describe love, language is an ill-fitted coat for it, it hangs loose and leaves unfitting folds. But poetry, though not all of it, comes close to representing Love. Not every poem, nor maybe even not any whole poem, but lines, phrases, words on the page, somehow strike me and I think "yes, that's just it! that's just the way it is!" And there are a few poets who really strike me as troubadours of love, Love in a meaningful way, meaningful to me. Pablo Neruda (with Edna St. Vincent Millay, and at turns Ronsard, Akhmatova, Plath, Secton, Whitman, sometimes Catullus and Roethke...) stands out as feeling how I feel, writing what I feel abstractly and without words. Many of the sonnets in this collection I do not love, and many I do not like and make me feel nothing. But there are a few which feel infinite to me, which burn in me like my own loves. And my favorite from Neruda, maybe my favorite-ever love poem, "If you forget me" I return to often, maybe every time I feel that pang of love.
Neruda knows, and writes of in his Love Sonnets, that love is an ache. Though love adds an infinitude to life, though it brims over everywhere on everything, it too makes one want more than enough, more than is possible or conceivable. To love someone is to want them so bad and so frequently that you would ruin yourself, like a child over-indulging in sweets. And the worst, the most painful but maybe the most wonderful, too, part of love, is the persistent mystery.
Like in Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse, I am moved by Neruda's understanding that to love is also to wait.
What I love in poetry is that it is always, when done right, an attempt at saying what can never be said. Death, love, grief, loss, these things are common material, for what truths can ever be said in language about them? We all feel them every day, but words diminish them. To Love is golden in all its glister, but to speak of love is only to wear gawdy jewelry, paste diamonds and pyrite. It is a poor imitation to describe love, language is an ill-fitted coat for it, it hangs loose and leaves unfitting folds. But poetry, though not all of it, comes close to representing Love. Not every poem, nor maybe even not any whole poem, but lines, phrases, words on the page, somehow strike me and I think "yes, that's just it! that's just the way it is!" And there are a few poets who really strike me as troubadours of love, Love in a meaningful way, meaningful to me. Pablo Neruda (with Edna St. Vincent Millay, and at turns Ronsard, Akhmatova, Plath, Secton, Whitman, sometimes Catullus and Roethke...) stands out as feeling how I feel, writing what I feel abstractly and without words. Many of the sonnets in this collection I do not love, and many I do not like and make me feel nothing. But there are a few which feel infinite to me, which burn in me like my own loves. And my favorite from Neruda, maybe my favorite-ever love poem, "If you forget me" I return to often, maybe every time I feel that pang of love.
n You know how this is:To me this is what it is to be in love. It is that everything becomes a messenger, a sign, a whisper of Love, even ugly and insignificant things, small things and silly trifles, and also big things that shake you, everything becomes a little boat which carries you off in a flash to that feeling of longing, of loving, of that person which you love which is absent. Time becomes measured in time-with and time-without, and always there is a feeling of lack in the former, and unending excess in the latter.
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists:
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.n
Neruda knows, and writes of in his Love Sonnets, that love is an ache. Though love adds an infinitude to life, though it brims over everywhere on everything, it too makes one want more than enough, more than is possible or conceivable. To love someone is to want them so bad and so frequently that you would ruin yourself, like a child over-indulging in sweets. And the worst, the most painful but maybe the most wonderful, too, part of love, is the persistent mystery.
n I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,To love someone because they are beautiful or kind or generous or smart is an affront to love. While these may spark an initial attraction they are insufficient to inspire love. While attraction may be slave to Love's Dictionary (what is "beauty"? what is "intelligence" or "ambition"?), love is a slave, rather, to it's gesturary. One's love is impinged upon by that smile they wear when you look at them a long time, or the way they carry themselves into the room, or bend over to remove a shoe, or grab a pen and think a moment before writing; it is that flash of confusion on the face when they are surprised, or the tension which builds in their brow when they are stifling despair, or when they are worried and they fidget just a bit. There can be no pride nor complexity in love, because to be in love is to be completely vulnerable to loss. While love adds to everything, it is a constant threat of losing everything, and having to build up from the ruins alone. It is so simple, excruciatingly simple "to love and be loved; to not love nor be loved; to love and not be loved; not to love but be loved" - it is the unnecessary things, the petty superficialities which interfere and threaten love, which make it seem complicated. When the brain and the heart are in discord, when one lies to oneself about what they want, what they love, what they need.
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving.n
Like in Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse, I am moved by Neruda's understanding that to love is also to wait.
n so I wait for you like a lonely houseFor one feels in love that before love their life was an empty house, unlivable. And they maintained it, washed the windows and unclogged the gutters and kept the paint fresh from chipping, but inside it was always empty, perhaps only filled in the corners but subtle things in shadows. But when you are in love, it seems that suddenly all your house is busy with new furniture and decoration for some imminent party, and there are things that you love but don't need, and things which are needed but not loved, and all over there is activity, and everyone (for now there seem so many guests) is thinking of one thing. And when you are with that person you love, it is not the party which you were waiting for, it seems like you are living in the house and it is some anonymous Sunday morning (you drinking your coffee, them reading the paper, feeding the cat), and everything is calm and quiet. But when they leave, there is the rush in the heart to make them stay. Your whole body aches to make them stay for ever, to keep them prisoner. What if they go away and they stop loving you? Your mind is again aflutter with worries and anxieties, and when it is about to give up, it is re-nourished by a fleeting memory of their smile, or a kind word, or an unexpected message. But always the windows ache, and inside the boiler cries.
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.n
