Love Poem

“Love Poem” is a free-verse poem composed of a single stanza in twenty-three lines. The poet herself was in middle-age—in her fifties—when she wrote it, and it was published as part of a larger collection of poems reflecting on this phase of life. In the moment of this poem, the reader is introduced to the speaker as she states her desire to express her feelings to her beloved. If the reader considers the poem to reflect the poet’s experience, the speaker and her beloved stand at the edge of a new phase of their lives. Perhaps the children are grown and gone from the household, and they are empty nesters left alone again with one another. In any case, the speaker addresses her lover with a desire to qualify this long-term love in a dramatic way by using the metaphor of a rushing stream swollen by winter melt.

The speaker identifies as a poet, doing the work of a poet, from the first line: “I want to write you” (Line 1). In the second line, the reader learns that what the speaker wants to write is a “love poem” (Line 2). Before the reader gets to the second line, however, the meaning is twofold: The speaker wants to write something for the person she is addressing; also, the speaker, as a writer and poet, wants to create or direct the other through the act of writing. Clarity—and energy—comes with the next lines, when the thing to be written becomes “a love poem as headlong / as our creek / after thaw” (Lines 2-4). The word “headlong” (Line 2) indicates a rush. In the sense of a body of water, the mind’s eye pictures a heavily flowing channel, white-capped and fast. In the sense of a love affair, the word implies impetuousness. A person falls in love; gravity plays a role, with the sense that the fall is beyond the power of the individual to prevent. The speaker wants to compare her love to this force of nature.

The phenomenon is not new, however, to the speaker and her beloved, who “stand / on its dangerous / banks and watch it” (Lines 5-7). They witness something they have seen before. Thaw is predictable, happening as it does after every winter. The stream itself is familiar; it is “our creek” (Line 3). What is not predictable is what the rush of water might do. The speaker knows the stream to be perilous in this state. It is powerful, as love is powerful, and heedless of what might get in its way. The surging water will “carry / with it every twig / every dry leaf and branch” (Line 7-9). These loose objects are easily pulled into the current, as the rushing water is not discerning. It will, too, pull away “every scruple” (Line 11) “in its path” (Line 10). Love, like a high-running creek, does not operate according to a moral code; it is only itself, adhering only to the laws of its wild nature. In the event of a spring melt, that which is suspended or frozen melts and moves, with speed, downhill. The stream, then, becomes “swollen / with runoff” (Line 13-14), and in so doing, is unrecognizable, if only temporarily. In a long-term marriage, the responsibilities of family life can impose a certain predictable rhythm, as well as keep the focus on raising the kids. A life transition can be a kind of thaw, when all that has been suspended between two people comes rushing into, say, a newly emptied nest.

Again, the speaker underscores her and her lover’s experience when she states, “we see it” (Line 12). This observational stance denotes some distance from the drama of the spring creek. The poet and her beloved “stand / on its dangerous / banks” (Lines 5-7) and “watch” (15). They have seen the creek rise before; they recognize the torrential potential of love. But recognition will not prevent injury. If they are to stay near enough to the current to witness its force, if they are to stay close to this love than runs in them, season after season, they “must grab / each other” (Lines 16-17). This grabbing, which repeats three times, and, in fact, ends the poem, has a force of its own. In grabbing one needs to grip, and tightly. To grab is not to hold another in a soft embrace, but to snatch, to seize, to capture.

The use of such a strong verb provides humorous contrast to the speaker’s worry about their footwear. She says, “we must grab each / other or / get out shoes / soaked” (Lines 19-22). Up to this point in the poem, the stakes seem to be a lot higher than wet feet. Wet feet are, however, uncomfortable, and the speaker, here, cares about their comfort. Hardly passionate, the concern indicates other things—tenderness and devotion—two qualities that can intensify over a long-term relationship. After the warning about the shoes, the speaker repeats her directive to take firm hold of one another, thereby returning urgency to the poem. It is about more than wet feet.

Thus, they must “step back” (Line 18) and “grab each other” (Line 23) to prevent the unthinkable, which is to lose one or the other—or both—to predictable yet devastating natural phenomena, one of which is time. The speaker and her lover have been together long enough to know that changes in life can come suddenly, and dangerously, often breaking apart relationships with its force. The sort of love the speaker writes about is not simply romantic love, but one rooted in that togetherness, against all challenges. Some of these challenges might be uncomfortable, like wet feet. Others are so devastating they can only be alluded to and would carry them downstream and apart.