Speaking Of Love
SPEAKING OF LOVE
As soon as we have spoken of it,
we are doomed to earn
the love we crave, and come to covet
that for which we yearn.
There are consequences to
the words we speak: take care
to hold your tongue, for billets-doux
are often hard to tear.
Expressing what can’t be explained
may be more foolish than
unleashing dogs that should be chained
if things don’t go to plan.
Inspired by some lines from a poem by Mary Jo Salter which James Longenbach quoted, reviewing her book “A Phone Call to the Future” (“Formalities: Mary Jo Salter’s elegant poetry can hide eviscerating question, ” NYT Book Review, March 9,2008) :
Salter’s latest collection, “A Phone Call to the Future, ” offers severely winnowed selections from her previous five books along with an ample collection of new poems. What she has omitted is as revealing as what remains. While her first book, “Henry Purcell in Japan, ” is introduced here with a poised villanelle about King Lear’s daughters, it once began with a poem far more suggestive of Salter’s sensibility — a sensibility repulsed by gory images of the dead Jesus in a Catholic church, preferring to dwell in an aesthetic realm of pure spirit: “His wounds look fresh, but it’s not this sight / that shocks me so much as His man-made skin: / He’s waxen, slick as a mannequin.” This poem, “For an Italian Cousin, ” is cast in envelope rhyme (abba) , the form that Tennyson, most elegant of English poets, employed in his long elegy “In Memoriam.” Reading the elegy, Verlaine said that Tennyson had a lot of reminiscences when he should have been brokenhearted. Salter’s elegance feels similarly motivated by a distaste for the unseemly. But what makes Salter worth reading — what makes her stand apart from the merely polemical elegance of the New Formalism — is that she herself is appalled by this distaste. While many of her poems are burdened by a need to dispense wisdom (“love dooms us to earn / love once we can speak of it”) , her best are driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable. Her second collection, “Unfinished Painting, ” includes “Elegies for Etsuko, ” a long poem about a friend who committed suicide.
And now love’s pain, your curse,
is all I have. Forgive me... What worse
punishment for suicide
than having died?
Here, the blunt rhyme between “suicide” and “died” makes the poem’s confrontation with mortality feel witheringly unavoidable. Rather than dispensing wisdom, Salter asks eviscerating questions.
3/10/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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