The nice thing about poets, is that although they are good at writing about love, they are equally bad at maintaining it.Much like the rest of us I suppose, except they make it sound better. We may linger over the poems describing the romance we long for, but in reality, sometimes it is nice to know that you aren’t the only bitter, single person in the world.
Sandra Beasley’s i was the jukebox is full of witty and spunky poems that could easily pass for conversations in Sex in the City. I say that in the best possible way. She is spunky. If you ever have the opportunity to hear her read, take it; she makes her poems come to life. She is a master at marrying the poetic tradition with real life. Reading her work is like reading a well-written screenplay. It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia meets Robert Frost.
Another Failed Poem About the Greeks
His sword dripped blood. His helmet gleamed.
He dragged a Gorgon’s head behind him.
As first dates go, this was problematic.
He itched and fidgeted. He said Could I
save something for you? But I was all out
of maidens bound to rocks. So I took him
on a roller coaster, wedging in next to
his preastplated body in the little car.
He put his arm around me, as the Greeks do.
On the first dip he laughed. ON the first drop
he clutched my shoulder and screamed like
a catamite. When we ratched to a full stop
he said Again. We went on the Scrambler,
the Apple Turnover, the Log Flume.
We went on the Pirate Ship three times,
swooshing forard, back, upside down,
and he cried Aera! waving his sword,
until the operator asked him to please keep
all swords inside the car. He was a good sport,
letting the drachmas fall out of his pockets;
sparing the girl who spilled punch on his shield;
waving as I rode the carousel’s hippogriff
though it was a slow ride, and I made him
hold my purse. On the way home
he said We should do this again sometime,
though we both knew it would never happen
since he was Greek, of course, and dead,
and somewhere a maiden rattled in her chains.
I would be remiss to not mention Anne Sexton. Her Love Poems are, as the title suggests, written on love. But she writes of a complex love, filled with longing, unrequited love, illicit (and maybe, she would say, not so illicit) affairs, and temporary and fleeting love. Her voice is the voice of the modern woman, trapped in ourselves and fighting to be heard. Anne Sexton is fearless; she tackles everything with a blunt honesty that can’t be anything but true.
from For My Lover, Returning to His Wife
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window,
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon…
I’ve blogged about Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife before, but I’m going to do it again. This collection of poetry won her the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. She is not as saucy as Sexton or Beasley, rather her poems are quiet but resonant. They build momentum line by line, until the silence is filled with the narrator’s voice. The poems recordof falling in and out of love; the aftermath of her divorce and her remarriage. The poems are built on the objects of a marriage–the house, the dishes, the shoes left by the door. She steers clear of bitterness, yet her writing is an elegy to the loss of love.
Frame
Most of the things you made for me–armless
rocker, blanket chest, lap desk–I gave away
to friends who could use them and not be reminded
of the hours lost there, 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.
This morning, though, as I put on my coat,
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.
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