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’s 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’t nail one floor on top of another without some kind of massive vertical beam connecting the two floors. As with my last house dream, I mostly felt dread.

What Chris sent, she excerpted from an article entitled A Little Anthology of Love Poems, by Robert Pinsky. Had I read the entire piece I might have dreamed different (thanks Apple).

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.

I couldn’t warm up to Her Triumph by Yeats, and I didn’t agree with Pinsky’s interpretation of Mock Orange, a poem I know well, by Louise Gluck, until Diane tutored me. I got hung up on

ìsealing my mouth,
the man’s paralyzing body-

I did love the final two poems, especially this one by William Carlos Williams:

The Act

There were the roses, in the rain.
Don’t cut them, I pleaded.
They won’t last, she said.
But they’re so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.

I might ask Chris: For a lover of rhyming poems … .

Pinksy:

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.

Something of that courtly reverse praise caps a contemporary poem I like, by the late Alan Dugan:

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh, I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.