PREFACE

 

"Love & Its Interruptions" is my first book with a single theme. The theme is love and the poems arrive on these pages from every decade of my writing life. As they were being assembled I was surprised how easily they fell together as one story, a story divided into three parts. But how could they not tell a story?

 

Parts One and Three are fairly predictable but Part Two, "In The Schools of Love," took me back to the seventies when I was a newly divorced woman working and living in Soho, Manhattan, going to college, writing poetry, teaching poetry. What a knotty, amazing, personal time. I knew many single men and women, and more often than not, these poems tell their stories rather than my own. Four in particular shocked me into a high degree of empathy for situations where life is dramatically and brutally curtailed.

 

I am introducing into this preface "Lucky the Girl," a poem I wrote in the seventies and published in "Burn All Night" under the title, "The Body's Joy." It was written for Anne Sexton because of her poem "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman." As the girl in the poem is asleep, we meet her mother and hear the words of a mother all daughters deserve --and many must do without.

 

When the poems are complete there is a section called "just a word -". These "words" are not notes on the poems, not comments, certainly not explanations. They are separated by a blank page so the poems can stand alone. I was asked to do this and was surprised when it was pleasure, not a chore.

 

Elizabeth Elliott

August 2014

 

Lucky The Girl

 

Lucky the girl whose mother sees womanhood

begin to bloom upon her daughter

and can accept and love that this be so;

 

Lucky the girl whose mother does not see

this fruitfulness of summer on its way

and out of envy burn the crop

with remarks that wither, deprecate,

or fill with fear;

 

Lucky the girl who can lie in fever,

trusting her face into the hand of she

who gave her birth, and while she sleeps

her mother dreams for her,

the pleasures of her body,

beginning to come near;

 

These pleasures, so acute they take the form

of lemons that become a map of all the world,

and this becomes the way her body,

when she's born a second time,

will know geographies of love;

 

Geographies of continental drift,

of hands and eyes and cunt and skin,

geographies of sweat and swamp and lakes at morning

when the mutual greeting of a smile

is all the world has need of to insure

its long, primordial spin;

 

For all is swelling here;

behind the heat of fever in her face

the garlic buds engorge,

and nearby apples begin their swell,

though true, till now,

she's been more like the promise of a bean;

 

Lucky the girl whose mother does not take alarm,

but says to her daughter,

Darling, let your body tie you in, in comfort,

and know there is nothing in your body

that will ever tell you lies,

that all this which seems new

is telling you its truth;

 

Lucky the girl whose mother,

like a wise old tree,

can reassure her string bean girl;

Lucky the girl whose mother loves to make way

for the season of her daughter's time.