What we talk about when we talk about love.

In an earlier life, when I was younger but mostly like the person I am today, I sent this poem to a girlfriend:

Prayer to Shadows on My Wall (source)
Mark McMorris

Soon the rush-lights will go out in the flesh
of sympathetic bodies once close to my own hand
and I will go to my hammock, thinking of little
except the numbness that alone makes bearable
the wind's twisting. I want atoms to separate
like hairs or dust onto the heads of my daughters.
I want to violate the edict that traps my hunger
in cages and away from her rough shoulder
and once to be enough for this and all the loves
that flicker through my bedroom before sleep.
They keep me awake, and tonight they are fierce
as whips or as needles to make the skin crawl.
I want to drift like the poui in a southerly wind
and settle where I need to before the faces erode,
my appetite of iron caulking the egg-shell heart.


A couple days later she sent me this poem in response:

Some Days in the City (source)
Mark McMorris

Some days, the sky descends to the level of mid-thigh water
the clock-hands come loose, and language is a skiff
over land through the rhythm of your breathing, girl
then I can hear the pink oriole, the body is a metronome
of blood and syllables beating placentas of speech
and news tingles like a caress of words still to be spoken:

umbrellas, bracelets, sleepers in doorways, police and victim--

I wind these objects to strike my human self dead
so as to taste the massy hive, the bloom and sounds
following my spending to gather up the pennies, kisses
meant for you, lost in transit, I follow my own kisses
to rooms in European cities, to the bottom of a shot glass

like a piece of economy flung about the streets
I spit pronouns, you fall from my lips, bewildered
I fall to the tracks, a suicide, a trembling drunk at
Du Pont and this day is a book left ajar, next to the rain.


This exchange only recently occurred to me. My impulse is of course to put these poems in dialogue: as if they are some kind of prophecy, that this girlfriend and I were speaking through someone else’s words, more eloquent than our own.

I revisit McMorris’s poems a lot, the same ones usually. I’m floored by the rhythm of his images, his words as vehicles for a tremendously calculated stream of consciousness that can be at once calamitous and desolate. Each image is interrupted by the next, each thought is amplified just as it’s articulated. Lost in these pulses, I return to these poems like they are songs stuck in my head but I can’t make out the lyrics. Like the final line in Prayer, a weak heart mended by the heaviest desire, my infatuation with McMorris’s poems comes from consistently feeling puzzled by them, a satisfaction in absence.

In Some Days, McMorris reminds us that language fails us not just in poetry but also in the real world, like the “clock-hands” unable to point to the time. “Some days,” words lose their power of distinction, of classification: broken barometers leaving us with that watery biblical mess: nothing is imbued with meaning because nothing is (yet) distinguished. In a romantic way, that is. McMorris finds himself only able to talk around things, not about them: “umbrellas, bracelets,” only “a caress of words,” scratching the surface.

Which brings me back to this girlfriend. I sent her a poem about severe wanting, the articulation and the drive of that longing. And she sent me back one about the pain of attainment and the inability to classify and to process. And maybe there’s no common ground between these two scenarios. Maybe these were just two ideas exchanged because they shared an author and some pretty words. Or maybe they refer to a similar sentiment, a same motive of desire.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we express love. From emails in a young relationship to how I write a birthday card to my mom. How can I say what I want to say without saying it? Or because I’m not saying it?

Uncertain how to tie up these thoughts, here’s one more, much simpler poem that I exchanged with this girlfriend, this one from a much more well-known poet.

Love (source)
Billy Collins

The boy at the far end of the train car
kept looking behind him
as if her were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass door
of the forward car and he rose
and opened the door and let her in

and she entered the car carrying
a large black case
in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high forehead
and somber eyes and her hair
was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,
he seemed a little awkward
in his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,
perfectly existing as a creature
with a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing this
on the back of a manila envelope
now that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turned
to lift the large, delicate cello
onto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at her
and what she was doing
the way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God
when he is doing something remarkable,
something that identifies him as God.

-----------------

Links:
Audio of McMorris Readings
BUY the super-dope The Blaze of the Poui
Springsteen plays 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), in Passaic, NJ, 1978.


-asher.