I’ve been thinking seriously about love poems. What does that term mean? Is the idea of loss inherent in the DNA of a love poem? Is a love poem something transient? Like a novel you keep coming back to, does the meaning change depending on the stage of life of the reader? Here are four excellent love poems that speak to those questions:
“The Encounter” by Louise Glück
From The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
You came to the side of the bed
and sat staring at me.
Then you kissed me–I felt
hot wax on my forehead.
I wanted it to leave a mark:
that’s how I knew I loved you.
Because I wanted to be burned, stamped,
to have something in the end—
I drew the gown over my head;
a red flush covered my face and shoulders.
It will run its course, the course of fire,
setting a cold coin on the forehead, between the eyes.
You lay beside me; your hand moved over my face
as though you had felt it also—
you must have known, then, how I wanted you.
We will always know that, you and I.
The proof will be my body.
From “The City in Which I Love You” by Li-Young Lee
From The City in Which I Love You (1990)
…Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father’s wrath,
and long from my mother’s womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter
the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.
“Frame, An Epistle” by Claudia Emerson
From Late Wife (2005)
Most of the things you made for me—blanket-
chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker—I gave
away to friends who could use them and not
be reminded of the hours lost there,
not having been witness to those designs,
the tedious finishes. But I did keep
the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors,
most of these years it has been invisible,
part of the wall, or defined by reflection—
safe—because reflection, after all, does change.
I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.
“Distortion” by Carl Phillips
From Speak Low (2009)
…According to Augustine, it’s a distortion of the will
that leads to passion, a slavish obedience to passion that
leads to habit, until habit in turn becomes hunger, a need.
–What is it about logic, when delivered unflinchingly,
that makes a thought like that sound true, whether true
or not? Significant of nothing but a wind that, rising
suddenly, falls as suddenly back, the trees swing
briefly in the same direction, as if I couldn’t quite
admit, yet, to a kind of grace
in synchronicity, and had
asked for proof, and the trees were one part of it, another
the light of this late-afternoon hour when it works both
against and in the body’s favor, like camouflage — which
in the end is only distortion by a prettier name. I know
all about that. You can call it heartlessness, an indifference
to ruin, a willed inability to be surprised by it — you’d be
mistaken. Don’t go. Let me show you what it looks like
when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.
What’s your take on the love poem? Which ones here do you wish you had written? Which ones feel true? The flushed passion of Glück is something we’ve all experienced. The immigrant’s story and the divorced woman are common tropes we see in literature, and love, as well. I personally like Phillips’ last lines the most. I think this is what good love is about: surrender and freedom at once.
