“JUST A WORD —”
“MAYBE TWO FRIENDS ARE TALKING ABOUT A POEM. ONE OF THEM MIGHT SAY SOMETHING LIKE ONE OF THESE LINES IN “JUST A WORD —” ”
PART I
FIRST LOVE FIRST HAPPINESS
First Love
A girl falls in love for the first time and the brief description of the New York City delicatessen says something about the strange richness of her feelings. Whether she is seventeen, twenty-seven, or twelve she is as breathlessly nervous as she is excited.
A Contender Observes From The Sidelines
Here’s a girl who is attracted to one guy but is flirting with everybody except him. The speaker is wise enough to know exactly what she’s doing, and why she’s doing it. The reader can’t tell if the speaker is the one she really likes but hopes it is — for her sake.
Buttons
Buttons on a dress are a metaphor for an inexperienced girl and how the buttons are all coming undone. The metaphor merely expands the possibilities for the imagination.
Call Forth The Spring!
The buttons are all undone! Oh scary happy day! God loves sex, right? He invented it after all. But nothing is prurient or under-handed here, just a step into the beginning of the beginning.
Love Grew On Us
Two people fall in love and much follows. The poem is long and skinny as if trying to slide along unseen — out of the reach of prying eyes and gossip. There are lots of rhymes because rhymes stitch a poem together further insuring that the lover’s privacy won’t be disturbed.
Listen To The Buds Pop
Another version of “Call Forth The Spring! Buttons on a dress are a metaphor for an inexperienced girl and how the buttons are all coming undone. — ” except it is fun and silly.
Love In A Chosen Scene
The lovers have grown up. Mistress is an old-fashioned word and though it has bad connotations, here is it supposed to convey commitment, order, a place where you want to be. Master has even worse connotations but here it only delineates his role as opposed to hers. There’s nothing in the poem to indicate they are anything less than complete equals.
The World’s Supply Of You Is Mine
They have children. But the wife is becoming disillusioned. She is wary. Perhaps her husband is a politician and she has noticed he likes the attention.
From Where I Sit
At some point death becomes a subject for thought.
Passacaglia
Something is not right. She goes to the bakery with her son and we hear the voice of the baker for whom this visit is a familiar pleasure. But for her this morning is not a pleasure. We hear distraction
and fear.
No Matter How We Read And Write
Deep trouble has come to their marriage.
Come Then, As Friend
It’s over but we must go on and do the best we can. There has been a terrible sacrifice.
From The Cemetery
We must deal with reality but in the midst of suffering we can find something to make us laugh.
PART II
IN THE SCHOOLS OF LOVE
Etymology Of Wife And Woman
Etymologists are historians of words, one word at a time. One morning I began to wonder about the early development of the words “wife” and “woman.” I turned to my nearly favorite book, Partridge’s “Origins,” and was surprised by how differently peoples of young nations viewed the female gender. The poem very briefly indicates how the Germans, the English, the Dutch and the French were thinking about “wife” and “woman” several hundred years ago. (Nonetheless, most seem to have become husbands and wives and had children.)
A Very Brief Affair
Meanwhile, here is a divorced single woman loose in the freedoms of New York City in the 1970s.
Unlike the City Where I Grew
Here is a second, more general picture of the New York City singles world in the seventies. Watch your step.
Superiority Of A Fly
More of the same but with a little heartbreak thrown in.
No Conflict?
Listening to many stories, I met both muted or exaggerated variations of this.
Long Live The Dog!
This dog represents lust. The speaker insists lust is part of love even if it doesn’t last very long.
Perverse And True
You mean it’s possible to have too much sex?
Little Girls
Now we come to the four poems I said in the Preface were very hard for me.... Each situation caused a painful empathy on my part.
Dead Man Dead Woman
More of the same without the children.
Midnight Quatrains
More than one agonizing situation is suggested.
Women, Guard Your Mates
Trickery. One woman understands another.
Heartache Travels
How quickly the heart breaks. How a broken heart can become
one’s wrap.
Generations
Tides going in and out like the generations inexorably passing. At very low tide there can be sharp rocks covered in a thick blanket of slippery seaweed. Children learn to be careful and can be frightened. Until someone sees what happened and understands, until someone cuts the thread and lets love get a fresh start, the failures of love pass a terrible inheritance on and on and on. Is this simple place, these rocks at low tide, where the pain began? Is this its name?
The Lady Stays, The Lady Stays
Coming from opposite directions two people meet. They appear to fulfill one another, but sooner or later one or both continue in the same direction from which each had come. If the pain is this great, is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Also, in the poem the lady disappears. But the title says twice, “The Lady Stays.” How often is it that the woman is the one to stay? How often the man?
Dancing In The Valley Of The Dolls
This is the first of three poems about being left. If someone’s going to leave you, there’s more than one reaction you can have. Defiance is definitely one.
Honey
Here’s another. Though maybe she’s only afraid he’s going to leave her and so she threatens him beforehand.
Oyster Solution
She has definitely been betrayed and she goes into full-blown action. Action as a way of not caring. Actually, I think I wanted to write a poem with oysters in it. The colors are beautiful.
When From The West
Just a human, naked response.
Wind With Water
Is she taking the finals for the Schools of Love?
Today Has Begun Well
No, she didn’t pass her exams in New York’s Schools of Love but she knows what to watch out for. This School of Love, by the way, has no relationship to the issues of female empowerment etc. Love is a sorry thing if a lover’s mind starts to dwell on power, justice, and equality, force or pride. (To say nothing of social class, money — OMG — it’s over, goodbye.) A good marriage takes care of all such.
PART III
LOVE AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS
Lately there have been signs that we might be escaping the prisons of the “self.”
Love Me As Myself
A wise person once said to me, “What you marry is what you get.”
Create Our Heavens
To what small or large degree do we bring our fate upon ourselves?
First Seconds
Even though the situation is much the same, there is a difference between this speaker and the much younger speaker in “A Contender Observes From The Sideline” in Part I.
Central Park In Winter
Surely no comment is needed.
If God Is Love
If there is reality to the strong feelings of the speaker, if the feelings are not just momentary excitement and basically no more than an illusion, and if, as the speaker believes, God exists, then God is way bigger, more comprehensive, and definitely way beyond hiding from.
Reach Into My Window
The metaphor indicates how all inclusive is this person who has caused the speaker such overwhelming and joyous feelings. Looked at another way: what could be worse if someone you loathe and fear is able to simply reach into your window and then rent all your property? The speaker would become a powerless, miserable slave. But not here —
Robbing The Rose
There is a fulfillment in sex which, if turned on its head and becomes mere plundering, should elicit a call to 911. But in mutual sex, the plundering, and loss of self is just what is required.
Skin To Skin
Sex manuals have little if any eroticism. That statement may be true but it doesn’t answer the question why “ripeness,” “knobs” and “mazurkas” can be thrown on a page and add up to eroticism even though the three words have no necessary relationship to each other.
Lovely Late Amtrak
Although there is overt anticipation of the coming meeting, there is also perhaps a certain reluctance or even fear. The metaphor of the sun going up and down, the stopping to let another train through, and finally a full-on rout should the tracks veer, the train take an unexpected direction, and then cease to exist. However, anticipation wins the day.
Each Course Prepared
How much free will do we have? Any? Sure, today is deliciously happy, but what have “they” prepared and is there a “they” who does the preparation?
White Bluets
A relationship can spring up between two people who never met, and never will meet. Nevertheless, the relationship can be sweet and true.
My Sisters Plait The Ribbons
One can’t help the attraction but one can recognize and honor the reasons for not acting on the attraction. Close ties to family, close sisters, several sisters, help to maintain a barrier one has chosen to erect, a barrier one is determined to maintain.
Collision
Both the man and the woman honor the barrier against acting on what turns out to have once been more than an attraction. They both love their spouses and time proves, during the course of this night, to have raised an effective barrier, though just barely.
Indium Blues
Scientifically, two oxides combine to produce a most beautiful blue, a new blue never before seen. This marvelous new color is used as a metaphor to show the depth of love one person can have for another even if the partner goes away forever — or — maybe not forever.
Just A Detour
This could be the voice of the partner who went away and does not return. This and Indium Blues were written years apart but themes of love and loss are eternal.
Rings The Mermaids Wear
Superficially this poem speaks to the power of sex to hold two people together — their nightly renewal of initial attraction. The metaphor of a boat however, not only shows how much work is involved, but how beyond the couple’s complete control it all is if non-existent mermaids are required to tell fact from fiction. Why does it take fourteen lines and a detailed metaphor to depict such a well known experience? I really don’t know. Expansion of the imagination? The pleasure of just pure dwelling on the subject?
A Stirring in the Heart For H and P
Falling in love is an all-consuming event and until it has happened once no one can foresee what force it has. It is way beyond lust, indeed it can change the very nature of lust.
Observation Unasked For
Should anyone wish advice on love, here’s some.
Each One Their Own Voice
The autonomy of things, the autonomy, the aloneness of each of us. Is it necessary? It is often sad.
Crone
No one can guess the riches of memory in the being of another.
Old people especially get type cast much too quickly.
If He Is Gone
This poem, also of unswerving love, begins in a bed and line by line moves out to a larger and larger context. The reader gradually comes into the presence of a vast bowl reaching toward the sky.
The Horse Of Life Rides Hard
Here is a kind of athletic program. It takes place in the ancient competition between the heart and mind, between love and mind.
Take My Hand
The lover in Indium Blues respects the one he/she loves too much to complain or even show curiosity about absence. In this poem the lover accepts with empathetic patience the physical disabilities acquired by his/her partner. Whether these are recent disabilities or disabilities from the past, it is love — acting and speaking in the present.
Concept Of Fields
This book’s done. And it all ends with law and with art. Is this what love was all about? Or is law and art two of the great human endeavors which love creates? At any rate, here’s what you’ve got when “it all turns out all right in the end.”