Love Poem

Love Poem

I shrank into myself somewhere, sometime, became keenly aware of my self, my own critic,

eying every move and clumsy attempt. I settled into the roll of “observer.” Watching myself

experience life rather than simply experiencing life. The observer of all things at arms length, I

watched with a skeptical, William Blake, eye: “to believe a lie/ When you see with, not through,

the eye.” I would not be fooled.

So it was with Love. Grade school crushes, sure: always aware of myself—a grade school boy,

shy, perhaps a bit dusty and better suited to cleaning out the stalls or alphabetizing my books.

I did not see myself as the kind of person I knew of, thought of, pictured really being deeply in

Love!

I fell in love with poetry, and with the “Love Poem.” I recognized my self in the intensity behind

those pages, a hidden secret intensity that didn’t know how to get out. I could see myself, or

the bits of self I wished were me, in Yeats:

“We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

Washed as by time’s waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”

Oh, that sweet agony! That intensity! I became a slave to that intensity. I found it in poetry, but

only as the observer. In workshop, there were students who really tapped into it, like Abe

Moore: “water isn’t blue when you are this close, but please just dive in with me because this is

life, Babe, and we can’t stay long...” I longed to dive in, felt painfully aware of myself and the

quiet Lack of that intensity in my polite, well-mannered interactions with the world.

Secretly I knew that somewhere there was a woman who would open that part of me—to

whom I would speak those lines of poetry, “a thought for no one’s but your ears...” but leaving

out the wearisome part where everything becomes faded. Perhaps there sliding into another

proven line. Neruda maybe: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs...you stretch out like

the world.” And I waited to meet her, the patient observer, watching. Not willing to try anything

that hadn’t been proven in the canon, nothing that would fall short of my life in verse as I

imagined it. So I waited and kept that safe arms length from what could have been just an

experience.

I don’t know how many experiences passed by while I waited, but it didn’t happen. Like

Pygmalion, I became inextricably attached to the artistic representation of something I didn’t

truly know. I was waiting to say, “Oh hi! I recognize you from the pictures...” The pictures of

flowing water, shooting stars, summer rain, fireflies, sunrises, city crosswalks, full moons,

alabaster, bells tolling—ringing and ringing and ringing.

I saw an ocean of poetic intensity and me sitting on the shore holding a broken paddle,

listening to the mermaids from T.S. Eliot:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

I was Prufrock growing old, measuring out my life with the mundane while watching for the

mythical! I had to give up on the “Love Poem.”

Possibly the drowning of a close friend was the nudge I needed (Think Eliot again, “fear death

by drowning”) a young guy, like me, but a guy full of life and heart, truly living each day until he

wasn’t. I decided the “Love Poem” was the artistic representation only of an ideal, the ultimate

portrayal of only a dreamed reality. Not real life. Not, at least, the whole picture. The rest of that

picture, as far as I could tell, involved getting a job, paying bills, raising a family, getting a home

and a sensible car with good safety ratings. Keeping up on your insurance coverage,

protecting your assets.

So I resigned myself to fulfilling the parts of That story that I could reach. I slipped comfortably

into a marriage, despite early signs of caution, with the promise, eventually realized, of two

kids, two cars, a mortgage, and plenty insurance. I made my life into the “raising kids” story,

and there I would have remained, but didn’t. She had more language for what we had

sacrificed than I had. Not knowing what, exactly, she was going to find, she left to search.

My identity, father & husband, self-sacrificer, became un-moored, set adrift in a new sargasso

crossing. In my small craft an Old Breton Prayer: “O God, thy sea is so great / And my boat is

so small.”

Waves thumped soft and hollow against my hull. I drifted, and slowly I drifted closer to my self,

the one I had left lost in poem and song. The vast ocean of experience lay out before me,

waiting for me to dive. Here was life waiting for me as I had once waited for life. I had forgotten

so much of that huge potential.

I had forgotten just enough of the “Love Poem” that when I met the true love of my life, I was a

blank page ready for whatever colors flowed. I was an empty cup ready to fill and to drink. I

just knew that she and I had a story to share between us. I eased into the waters. I got to know

her as an old friend, familiar and open. We cried together and didn’t know quite why it felt so...

important and right! She brought me back to that awkward school boy fidgeting in his clothes

as if I had known her all along. The poems were mine, and now, as a man, as a full being, again

so aware, I could open to her and say, “Hi! I see you. I’ve been waiting for you for so long. I’m

so grateful you are here!”