I’m not sure if I succeeded in telling this love story, especially since I discovered it was a love story midway through the poem. And this, sometimes, is the value in writing poetry. We discover the meaning of things in the process, even the meaning of an event that happened more than forty years ago, and one that always stuck in the mind because of its novelty. But then you find out the event wasn’t truly novel. It was the same old story. A love story. But of course a child wouldn’t know that or see that that’s the most important kind there is. Or a man for that matter. Stanzas sixteen and seventeen, the last:
that drives me to this day. She never revealed
her expeditions either. And when she died
a few years later I remembered not
a thing about her time revivified
in spirit except to think it far out, weird
that daffodils had suddenly appeared
from out of nowhere in Samara's yard.
But more important things were beckoning
—the revolutions of desire incarnate—
than that pretty plot of reckoning.
The summer of love looked to offer more
than adoration from some distant shore.
(complete poem here)
No comments:
Post a Comment