Chris tells me she thought of both Diane and me when she read Love Song: I And Thou (below). I believe it mostly reminded her of me. Last night after reading the poem, I dreamed I built a second story addition onto my friend Rob\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ranch-style house. He lives in a three story Colonial, so go with the dream here. When I finished with the stud framing, and had yet to sheath the house in plywood, I stood back to look at my creation. To my dismay, the blowing wind was shaking the house as if an invisible giant were trying to dislodge dinner. I worried about the wind toppling the house once the walls were completed. Anxious to mend my mistake, I thought maybe I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t nail one floor on top of another without some kind of massive vertical beam connecting the two floors.<\/i> As with my last house dream, I mostly felt dread.<\/p>\n
What Chris sent, she excerpted from an article entitled A Little Anthology of Love Poems, <\/a> by Robert Pinsky. Had I read the entire piece I might have dreamed different (thanks Apple). <\/p>\n Pinsky offers a rich collection of non-traditional love poems, most of which I find unsettling and\/or difficult to grasp. It hammers home, though I read (compared to most men with blue eyes in their fifties who are not poets) a lot of poetry, my likes are pretty darn narrow.<\/p>\n I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t warm up to Her Triumph by Yeats, and I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t agree with Pinsky\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interpretation of Mock Orange, a poem I know well, by Louise Gluck, until Diane tutored me. I got hung up on<\/p>\n \u00c3\u00acsealing my mouth, I did love the final two poems, especially this one by William Carlos Williams:<\/p>\n The Act<\/p>\n There were the roses, in the rain. I might ask Chris: For a lover of rhyming poems … .<\/p>\n Pinksy:<\/p>\n Another tradition of love poetry celebrates the beloved with a kind of inverse compliment. Shakespeare says his mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun, and that black wires grow on her head; Shakespeare’s contemporary Michael Drayton begins a sonnet, “Three sorts of serpent do resemble thee.” That sort of compliment-by-complaint was already a conventional move when Shakespeare and Drayton were writing. It compliments the loved one by crediting her with a sense of humor, an appreciation of irony, and the ability to see through trite praises.<\/p>\n Something of that courtly reverse praise caps a contemporary poem I like, by the late Alan Dugan:<\/p>\n LOVE SONG: I AND THOU<\/p>\n Nothing is plumb, level or square: Chris tells me she thought of both Diane and me when she read Love Song: I And Thou (below). I believe it mostly reminded her of me. Last night after reading the poem, I dreamed I built a second story … Continue reading
\nthe man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paralyzing body-<\/p>\n
\nDon’t cut them, I pleaded.
\nThey won’t last, she said.
\nBut they’re so beautiful
\nwhere they are.
\nAgh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
\nand cut them and gave them to me
\nin my hand.<\/p>\n
\n
\n the studs are bowed, the joists
\nare shaky by nature, no piece fits
\n any other piece without a gap
\nor pinch, and bent nails
\n dance all over the surfacing
\nlike maggots. By Christ
\n I am no carpenter. I built
\nthe roof for myself, the walls
\n for myself, the floors
\nfor myself, and got
\n hung up in it myself. I
\ndanced with a purple thumb
\n at this house-warming, drunk
\nwith my prime whiskey: rage.
\n Oh, I spat rage’s nails
\ninto the frame-up of my work:
\n it held. It settled plumb,
\nlevel, solid, square and true
\n for that great moment. Then
\nit screamed and went on through,
\n skewing as wrong the other way.
\nGod damned it. This is hell,
\n but I planned it, I sawed it,
\nI nailed it, and I
\n will live in it until it kills me.
\nI can nail my left palm
\n to the left-hand crosspiece but
\nI can’t do everything myself.
\n I need a hand to nail the right,
\na help, a love, a you, a wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"