“To the Student Who Asked Why He Earned a 'C' on an Essay about Love”

Because love has its own grammar,
its own sentences,
some that run-on too long,
others just fragments.
It uses a language
not always appropriate
or too informal,
and often lacks clarity.

Love is punctuated all wrong,
changes tenses abruptly,
relies heavily
on the first person,
can be redundant,
awkward,
full of unnecessary repetition.

Every word is compounded.
Every phrase, transitional.

Love doesn’t always know the difference
between lie and lay,
its introductions sometimes
lack a well-developed thesis,
its claims go unfounded,
its ad-hominem attacks
call in question
its authority.

With a style that’s inconsistent,
a voice either too critical
or too passive,
love is a rough draft
in constant need of revision,
whose conclusion
rarely gives any sense
of closure,
or reveals the lingering
possibilities of a topic
that always expects high praise,
and more often than not
fails to be anything
but average.

OMM: Ignorance

"You can't count the mistakes you didn't know you made."

Goldfish are ordinary

 At the pet store on Court Street,

I search for the perfect fish.

The black moor, the blue damsel,

cichlids and neons. Something

to distract your sadness, something

you don’t need to love you back.

Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,

orange, red-capped, pearled body,

the darting translucence? Goldfish

are ordinary, the boy selling fish

says to me. I turn back to the tank,

all of this grace and brilliance,

such simplicity the self could fail

to see. In three months I’ll leave

this city. Today, a chill in the air,

you’re reading Beckett fifty blocks

away, I’m looking at the orphaned 

bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor. 

Do you want to see aggression?

the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish

to the light while dropping handfuls

of minnows into the bowl. He says,

I know you’re a girl and all

but sometimes it’s good to see.

Outside, in the rain, we love

with our hands tied, 

while things tear away at us.

In The Kitchen

It’s right before you drive away:

our limbs still warm with sleep,

coffee sputtering out, the north

wind, your hips pressing me

hard against the table. I like it hard

because I need to remember this.

I want to say harder. How we must

look to the road that’s gone,

to the splayed morning of cold

butter and inveterate greed.

Light comes and goes in the field.

Oranges in a bowl, garlic, radio.

In the story of us, no one wins.

Isolation is a new theme

someone says. By now

I’ve invented you. Most people

don’t like to touch dead things.

That’s what my friend tells me

when I find my fish on the floor.

It must have wanted an out.

Sometimes my desire scares me.

Sometimes I watch football

and think: four chances

is enough to get there. But 

we don’t have helmets.

I want to say harder,

I can take it, but

there’s no proof I can.

❤️

Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart 

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes 

this brown paper bag of peaches 

we bought from the boy 

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches. 

From laden boughs, from hands, 

from sweet fellowship in the bins, 

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent 

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, 

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. 

O, to take what we love inside, 

to carry within us an orchard, to eat 

not only the skin, but the shade, 

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold 

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach. 

There are days we live 

as if death were nowhere 

in the background; from joy 

to joy to joy, from wing to wing, 

from blossom to blossom to 

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

❤️

OMM:

"If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company."

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony."

Loser Bait

Related Poem Content 

Some of us

are chum.

Some of us

are the come-hither

honeycomb

gleamy in the middle

of the trap’s busted smile.

Though I let myself a little

off this hook, petard

by which I flail,

and fancy myself more

flattered — 

no ugly worm!

Humor me

as hapless nymph,

straight outta Bullfinch, minding

my own beeswax,

gamboling, or picking flowers

(say daffodils),

doing that unspecified stuff

nymphs do

with their hours,

until spied by a layabout youth,

or rapey God

who leaps unerring, staglike,

quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea.

Or maybe

the right?

For didn’t I supply

the tippy box, too?

Notch the stick on which

to prop it?

Didn’t I fumble the clove hitch

for the rope?

Leave the trip lying obvious

in the tall, buggy grass?

Ever it was.

Duh.

Be the mat,

and the left foot finds you welcome.

Though there’s always a subject, a him

or herself. But to name it

calls it down, like Betelgeuse,

or the IRS.

It must be swell

to have both deed and

the entitlement, for leaners who hold our lien,

consumers who consume like

red tide ripping through a coastal lake?

Who find themselves so very well

when gazing in that kiddie pool, or any

skinny inch of water.

That guy, remember? How tell this tale

without him? A story

so hoary, his name’s Pre-Greek.

What brought Narcissus down?

A spotty case

of the disdains, I think,

a one-man performance

where the actor hates his audience.

Goldacre by Monica Youn

We’ve seen claims that Twinkies … aren’t baked, the sponge cake instead being “a pure chemical reaction” involving something that “foams up”; the deception is made complete by coloring the confections’ bottoms brown to make it appear that they’ve been baked … As always, the truth is far less exciting than the lore.

—Snopes.com

as if         you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends

as if         these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-infused fog

as if         every origin story didn’t center on the same sweet myth of a lost wholeness

as if         such longing would seem more palatable if packaged as nostalgia

as if         there had once been an instant of unity, smoothly numinous, pellucid

as if         inner and outer were merely phases of the same substance

as if         this whiteness had been your original condition

as if         it hadn’t been what was piped into you, what suffused each vacant cell, each airhole, each pore

as if         you had started out skinless, shameless, blameless, creamy

as if         whipped, passive

as if         extruded, quivering with volatility in a metal mold

as if         a catalyzing vapor triggered a latent reaction

as if         your flesh foamed up, a hydrogenated emulsion consisting mostly of trapped air

as if         though spongelike, you could remain shelf-stable for decades, part embalming fluid, part rocket fuel, part glue

as if         instead you had been named twin, a word for “likeness”; or wink, a word for “joke”; or ink, a word for “stain”; or key, a word for “answer”

as if         your skin oxidized to its present burnished hue, golden

as if         homemade

A Pretty Song by Mary Oliver

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?

This isn’t a play ground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods

that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

Waves

I have swum too far
out of my depth
and the sun has gone;

the hung weight of my legs
a plumb-line,
my fingers raw, my arms lead;

the currents pull like weed
and I am very tired
and cold, and moving out to sea.

The beach is still bright.
The children I never had
run to the edge

and back to their beautiful mother
who smiles at them, looks up
from her magazine, and waves.

6 JUST A GENTLE REMINDER

A LOT OF WORK

goes into making sex alluring sex

is just this and that

but it seemed, for a moment, that a new

climax had been won when

even the sky fingered me

with a slobbery insistence when

we were retching with so much desire

we created a whole new atmosphere

grabbing at sex things /

using the sick bag to be actually sick in

now the shower curtain is transparent

it’s a way of saying, “I want you too

to have this experience

so that we are more alike

like a sign that life struck once

in a slippy-bits marathon

that began when our eyes were magnets

yanked to each other’s fully-charged

crotches at a picnic

when it was essential

to make every enhancement

to our ‘connection’ by getting seriously indecent

beside the Bluetooth wireless speaker system

until even the trees had to dash inside

to pour ice in their underpants”

while I choked up playing the scene, as we lived it,

united by our pursuit of arrhythmia or

satisfying itches to that

catchy bridge section in Chopin

(I couldn’t wait to come

with Chopin through his melancholic meadow

(not that I approve of background music

(I prefer to foreground the piano

by massaging it loud and all over

until the top layer comes off in my hand

and the pedal squeaks for humanity

(I like to FEEL a piano as an instrument

of interruption and consciousness

(though I also like to take light swims, to get away

from what I FEEL (today I felt

jelly beans resemble kidneys))))))

which throbs like everyone grieving

 

 

When I Die by NG

when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love

"The problem with love is not what we feel but what we   

wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel 

something." 

#nikkig

Truth by GB

And if sun comes 

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

 

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years—

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

 

Shall we not shudder?—

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

 

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

 

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

❤️

Love Train

My bowl brimming with pretzels, 

the snack you wanted least, 

I slid open the door of our sleeping car 

where we had been enjoying the country rushing by, 

as if   we were the first two people 

to look down into the valleys and see 

bright necks of pines stretch across farms 

and streams to the groves they once cradled. 

You had asked for Earl Grey cookies 

sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows 

made of chocolate, but all the tea bags had been dunked 

and the chocolate melted over biscotti. 

When I came bearing the salted and twisted news, 

the room was empty but for a heel. It was black 

as a bunting, and wound with zippers, 

and every time the car rocked 

it looked ready to fly and escape 

into the cold, tangled air 

of   travel that always feels heavy 

with joy and desire, and a little sadness, 

always a little sadness, 

because of the leaving, which is what I do 

when I realize I’m in the wrong room 

and that numbers have betrayed me again 

while I was hunting and gathering, 

foraging like Homo habilis

who probably never lost his cave. 

Out of patience, I opened every door 

marked with threes and eights, those conjoined twins 

disastrously separated at birth, 

and roused the scabbed eyes of sleepers 

like a beggar, no, an angel, 

a begging angel who has written on his heart 

will work for love. 

Having not found our room, not heard 

the sharp swing of   your voice, 

I descended upon the passenger cars 

and row upon row of couples asleep 

or staring out the windows like zombies 

trying to remember what happens next 

once the newspaper is well-thumbed, 

the tea has gone cold, and the conversation is dead. 

I called for you, in vain, even using your secret names, 

the ones only the night knows: 

wind-kiss, brilliant-fruit, dervish-moon    . . . 

Over and over, I said your names, 

over and over until they filled 

the wounded air of  the car 

and when there was no more room 

for another sound, they caught and hooked 

the ring of   the brakes hugging the rails. 

Just when I thought I wouldn’t find you, 

you were there, the train was pulling away, 

and I was watching you slowly eat 

a dish of whipped cream and bananas

— the house special — in a cafe 

in a city we didn’t know. 

When you finished, we started walking 

down a road that bent like a smile, 

a shy smile, like the one the Japanese cat wore 

on your purse. The road, we were told, 

would take us to the end of   the line 

where all lovers in search of   joy 

packed on bullet trains — they’re the fastest 

on two continents — arrive every hour.