{"id":132801,"date":"2019-01-17T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132801"},"modified":"2019-01-17T10:36:36","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T15:36:36","slug":"poetry-rx-this-was-once-a-love-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/17\/poetry-rx-this-was-once-a-love-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: This Was Once a Love Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our column\u00a0Poetry Rx<\/a>, readers\u00a0write in<\/a>\u00a0with a specific emotion, and our resident poets\u2014Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz\u2014take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week,\u00a0Kaveh Akbar is on the line.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

Dear Poets,\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Objectively, I\u2019m doing well. I have a loving partner, a new well-paying job, and, on the side, my writing career is blossoming. However, I have a ceaseless disquieting anxiety that permeates most of my time alone and prevents me from reading and writing. I need a poem that will remind me to keep my head up and maybe clear some of the clouds from my brain.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you,\u00a0<\/em>
\nUnmoored\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dear Unmoored,<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a tall order for a single poem. I\u2019m writing this to you on my thirtieth birthday, on the heels of a year in which I married my favorite person, started a dream job, and became an official Doctor of Poetry\u2014I\u2019ve had so many sweet occasions for gratitude these past twelve months, I should have cavities in every tooth. And in spite of this, much of my year has felt governed by a kind of thick dread, a persistent doom twisting at the roots of my lungs. The usual factors are partially to blame\u2014the long shadow of a fascistic regime, an oncoming and increasingly inevitable ecological collapse\u2014but it\u2019s more than that. Now that I\u2019ve left, for the time being, the proverbial (and literal) gutter, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of living a life I\u2019d be pained to lose. Louise Gl\u00fcck\u2019s \u201cThe Red Poppy<\/a>\u201d speaks to this feeling beautifully. Gl\u00fcck writes from the perspective of a poppy plant who says things like, \u201cFeelings: \/ oh, I have those; they \/ govern me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The great thing
\nis not having
\na mind. Feelings:
\noh, I have those; they
\ngovern me. I have
\na lord in heaven
\ncalled the sun, and open
\nfor him, showing him
\nthe fire of my own heart, fire
\nlike his presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The poppy speaks the same language as its human siblings, the language of the \u201cshattered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because in truth
\nI am speaking now
\nthe way you do. I speak
\nbecause I am shattered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love this poem because at its center is a speaker who is conversational, even chatty, at first. The poppy feels the presence of an identifiable divine, opens up to it in bloom, but even that is not enough to overcome the poppy\u2019s native doom. To know that you\u2019ve been the beneficiary of an incredible bounty, to intellectually understand all the reasons for which you should be grateful, but to still feel governed by dread (the dread of losing everything, the dread of not deserving it in the first place)\u2014what does one do with that? I don\u2019t have an answer, Unmoored, and if you find one I hope you\u2019ll share it. In the meantime, I hope this poem might offer you a bit of company, as it has to me.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dear Poets,<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the past few months, a close friendship has evolved into what feels like an emotional affair. He is married. His wife is slowly dying.\u00a0<\/em>I\u2019ve scoured Esther Perel podcasts and Modern Love essays for practical advice, but what I truly need is solace. Am I a monster for allowing myself to develop feelings? Or am I a masochist?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Yours,<\/em>
\nConvinced That I Am Both\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Convinced,<\/p>\n

I want to begin this with my standard preamble: I very much hope you\u2019re speaking with a professional (a professional poet doesn\u2019t count, that phrase still feels to me like an oxymoron). It is totally understandable that, in the course of trying to be useful to your friend, in the swarm of intense and complicated feelings flying everywhere, you\u2019ve caught a few stray beams. We don\u2019t have separate lobes in our brains for platonic love, romantic love, and grief\u2014it all muddies together in a messy swamp of tiny glands and hormones and electrical synapses.<\/p>\n

I offer you Jane Hirshfield\u2019s \u201cThis Was Once a Love Poem<\/a>.\u201d It ends:<\/p>\n

What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
\nAn unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.<\/p>\n

The longing has not diminished.
\nStill it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
\nthe cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.<\/p>\n

Yes, it decides:
\nMany miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
\nWhen it finds itself disquieted
\nby the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
\nit will touch them\u2014one, then another\u2014
\nwith a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Right now, it sounds to me like you may need to take a step back to allow your friend to dictate the shape of your relationship. \u201cIt is time to consider a cat, \/ the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.\u201d Your friend\u2019s wife is dying. I have no experiential referent for what that\u2019s like, but I can\u2019t imagine it\u2019s a clean or straightforward process. It\u2019s possible he fully reciprocates the love you\u2019re starting to feel, but it\u2019s also very likely he\u2019s confused and searching for a kind of intimacy that may no longer be accessible to him during his wife\u2019s illness.<\/p>\n

Often, real, rigorous compassion runs opposite our own desire. Longing in Hirshfield\u2019s poem \u201cfinds itself disquieted \/ by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life.\u201d I wish peace for you, your friend, and his wife. I hope you find your longing distractible, the silences bearable, for as much time as necessary for all three of you to remain safe. I hope, after time, you too (you two?) will discover that what you knew in the morning, you still believe at nightfall.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dear Poets\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m getting married next year to my beloved. Rather than just a celebration of romantic love between two people, I\u2019m thinking about it as a pledge of my love for the universe: its brain-stretching vastness, our smallness within it, and everything in between that exists, is joyful, and both destroys and gives life. Grateful for any words that capture this feeling.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely yours,<\/em>
\nUniversally Awed<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear UA,<\/p>\n

Congratulations to you and your beloved! I recently got married and felt a similar impulse to celebrate not just my love, but also the profound strangeness that there should be such a thing as love, that there should be such a thing as a life to build from it.<\/p>\n

For you, I offer one of the poems read at our actual wedding\u2014Nicole Sealey\u2019s \u201cObject Permanence.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
\neach petting the sheet to be sure.<\/p>\n

How have we managed our way
\nto this bed\u2014beholden to heat like dawn<\/p>\n

indebted to light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sealey begins the very first line with surprise, awe\u2014how strange, that one should wake and find such a cherished body stretched out alongside their own! The poem moves from one sense of awe to another: how strange that our entire lives have lead us to the ephemeral now, and how strange that once all those moments accumulate into a life, we lose them along with the love we fashioned them into. It\u2019s a perfect poem. It\u2019s all in there. May it hold you both in its expansive awe, as it has held us.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Want more? Read earlier\u00a0installments of\u00a0Poetry Rx<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i>Need a poem?\u00a0Write to us<\/a>! In the next installment, Sarah Kay will be answering questions.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Kaveh Akbar\u2019s poems have appeared recently in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0Yorker<\/span>,<\/em>\u00a0Poetry,<\/em>\u00a0t<\/em>he<\/em>\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0York Times,<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>Nation,\u00a0and elsewhere. His first book is\u00a0<\/em>Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at\u00a0Purdue<\/span>\u00a0University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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