Tag Archives: love poetry

Love in the Time of Plague

I got an email from Kickstarter a few days ago that spoke to the current moment:

“In times of crisis, some might feel selfish pursuing creative work. It might be hard to imagine why your art matters in the midst of a pandemic. But think of the book that shaped your childhood; the movie you watch whenever you feel sad. Creative work transports us. It recharges and renews us. And in order to experience it, someone needs to make it—to get that strange, unprecedented idea out into the world.” (No author cited)

But a few hours earlier, for the first time in a long damn time I started writing a poem, which I will find tomorrow and finish and post here. But in the meantime I wrote this for a prompt on one of my Facebook groups. It is dedicated to Musashi, who is now the Teaching Assistant for my now-online classes.

 

Love in the time of plague is this black cat

walking over my keyboard because he knows

attention is love, attention to what your loved one

attends to is love, and also when she doesn’t yell at you

for making all the M’s run across the screen

that reticence, the soft voice calling you

a goober, that most of all is also love.

IMG_0673

And yes. That is my rollbook he’s sitting on.

A Made Thing before Valentine’s Day

“My Foucault-friend, who is now an ­anthropologist, observes that in the West we tend to think of made things as being false” (Biss).

Anti-Valentines-Day-Metal-Playlist

If the poem I make is a false thing, as made as my house,

As false as your eyelashes that you also made this morning,

As thing-like as your car that falsely carried you

To work yesterday and just as falsely, eventually,

Carried you home last night, then how am I to cultivate

Truth like a garden of earthy, homegrown delights?

 

If my poem, made from words, which presumably also

Have been made, in this case by our ancestors

Who agreed what the grunt would mean, and the hiss

And the slow accumulation of consonants, then how

Can beauty be real, since there too we simply have to

Agree on the symmetry and style of another face?

 

If the song you made from notes just lying around

The universe is false, if the story you told yourself

Of love and loss and, eventually, redemption and love

Again, if that too is made and therefore false, what hope

Do any of us have to find the real thing, the true and

The beautiful thing, the unmade heart beating to ours?

 

Biss, Eula. “‘The Folded Clock,’ by Heidi Julavits.” Review. New York Times. 27 Mar. 2015. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.

In Which My Dreams Are Far More Interesting Than My Actual Life

messy-bed

Or, that thing in which I keep waking up with fragments of love poems in my head even though I am not in love or even, for that matter, actually dating anybody.

 

If I could only hold you for an hour

Or three, and feel the contours of your face

Against my hands, I would learn not to fear

The terror of my heart beating its drum

For the world to hear, or feel your heart

Beating against mine, chest to chest

In the tangle of the night.