Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Lovely Love"

Thoughts on, well, love.

A Lovely Love

       Lillian's

Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lovely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise men, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.


from The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005) 

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I am writing this newsletter early in the week because, when you read this, I will be married. Which is awesome. Absolutely. It’s really cool. And so I’m thinking of love, and, when I think of love poems, I usually think of this one first, this beautiful sonnet — did you catch that? — by Gwendolyn Brooks.

This poem is a sonnet, yes, but there is a real freedom that Brooks finds within the form. She pushes the form, makes it her own, flexes with the rhyme scheme, combines elements of different ideas of a sonnet. She inserts phrases — “janitor javelins epithet,” “cheapen hyacinth darkness,” “smiled away our shocks” — that dance in the mouth and in the world and let you know that you are reading someone writing something so wholly their own that you cannot help but be grateful.

And then that last line:

Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

What a soaring, gorgeous way of describing love in this world. And what a soaring, gorgeous way to describe this poem, which resists definition at every turn, even while building itself from a semblance of definition. I think of two things most often when I think of this poem — that last line, and the repetition of the phrase “Let it be.” Embedded within both moments is an idea of allowance and permission that feels so necessary to love, so necessary to being fully oneself, and, as such, so necessary to love again.

Yes, when I think of love now, maybe I wish, always, to let such a thing be definitionless in the midst of such strictness. And yes, even as I type this, there is a little red squiggly line under that word — definitionless — as if it is already wrong, as if it is already breaking some sort of rule, as if the world already wants it punished and corrected. No. Let it be.

What more can I say? Perhaps a lot. I’ve been thinking, this week, of a number of paragraphs and poems. Let me show you a few. I’ve been thinking of this paragraph almost at the end of an essay in Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey:

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.

This paragraph almost made it into our ceremony. Reading it over the past weeks, I’ve been so struck by Ruefle’s point that, “in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same.” I’m thinking of what it might mean to mark every beginning of my life — whether this one I am embarking on now, or even the smallest, most seemingly-trivial ones — and every beginning undergone in the lives of those I love with a reminder that love is present, that we are not alone, that we don’t have to be afraid.

And I’m thinking of the beginning of Mikko Harvey’s poem, “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield”:

I love the shape of our apartment
as I walk through it in near-total darkness. I love walking slowly through that
darkness with my arms out, trying not to bump
into furniture. How many apartments
have I done this in now? I loved
them all. Or possibly I just loved 
how they held darkness, amplified and lent
personality by the darkness surrounding them. Wherever you are
is a country. Touch it softly
to make it stand still.

I love the tenderness at the heart of this, the unknowing. I think for a long time I thought of love as something that required absolute certainty. But now, I love thinking of love as a way to approach both what you know and what you don’t with curiosity and softness, like walking through a room with your arms out.

This reminds me. I’ve been reading Michael Moore’s just-released translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (and following along with A Public Space). There’s a moment when Manzoni writes:

The heart, of course, to those who heed it, always has some wisdom to share about the future. But what does the heart know? Only a fraction of that which has already happened.

The heart is a beautiful thing and yet knows so little. The future, too — full of potential to be beautiful. Full of the unknown. Full of mystery. So yes, as you walk through what you know and what you don’t, the fraction of presentness we call this life, your arms should be out. That way, if you bump into someone — and not just a piece of furniture — you embrace.

And life, too, will probably be full of moments such as the one Linda Gregg writes about in “New York Address,” moments of confusion and being-too-hard-on-oneself and pain, yes, but still love, and still light:

I didn't seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won't speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won't love.
Yes I will bless. No I won't close. Yes I won't give.
Love is on the other side of the lake.
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that.

One more thing to celebrate. Today, as I write this, a new piece of writing by Sasha Fletcher came out, and it is about marriage, and in this ecstatic, grace-filled, bombastic, wild, and gorgeous thing are moments such as this one:

We were married at home, in our bed, what I mean is the ghosts in the laundromat had wandered up and, seeing the ring of engagement upon your finger, asked us if we wouldn’t maybe like to be married, and we would we did, then we were, and they wept and wept and wept, and the room was so full of love that the ghosts nearly came back to life then and there, but they didn’t, not that time.

It is good to be ecstatic about love. It must be. It is good to write lines that repeat let it be, let it be, let it be. It is good to be joyous, to eat a slice of pizza and say this is the last slice of pizza we will eat before we’re married…and then we’ll eat more. It’s good, yes. It’s good to believe in the ghosts of the laundromat, and it will be good, I know, to do laundry and be married, to smile as I load both our clothes into the washer and feel the simple pleasure of threading a quarter perfectly into the machine. Ecstatic about the ordinary. Ecstatic about the extraordinary. Ecstatic about coming home, coating the pan with olive oil, simmering the little tomatoes in it before crushing them with the broad side of a spoon. Ecstatic about salting it all, tossing the pasta in, the basil, being able to say — as I do now, and yet again, and again, and again — that it’s made with love. Being able to laugh as I say it. In that moment — in any moment, and in love — being able to laugh.

I’ve had the honor of being asked twice to write poems to celebrate a marriage. Over five years ago, I wrote a poem for a friend’s wedding. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much I needed to believe in joy as something light-filled, stunning, and extraordinary. I still believe in the joy that surprises a body in this world — the joy of witnessing two people dancing on a subway platform, the joy of light adding another layer to water — but I also believe now in both love and joy as things filled with the consistent and ordinary dailiness of life. The doorway you walk through each day to see what is on the other side. And how, sometimes — maybe every time — it’s worth pausing to look at what you’re walking through — the worn, sometimes-even-too-narrow frame of our lives — in order to just say yes, I’m walking through this.

Anyways, here is that poem from so long ago.

Wedding Poem that Ends with Joy

after Ross Gay

I have been awake for long enough to know
the world does not disappear when you fall
in love. Sometimes it comes closer & reminds you

of all it contains & all you cannot: the night’s
pale & patient quiet, the feeling of trying
against all this whispering nothing to be alive

& not alone. The first time I fell in love I mistook
the rain for a waterfall & each morning rose
struggling for air. Now I am older & you are

too & like my grandmother, whose shuffling
we just assumed was laziness, maybe we are only
trying to move slower through this world,

as if we lingered long enough in each step,
we might find a garden growing beneath
our hands. I miss everything I don't have yet.

& so lovers & all of you gathered grass-like
on this bed of everything we call the world,
I want to tell you how last night while walking

to the train from the school where I was teaching 
I saw two children splitting a Double Quarter
Pounder & how their mouths like fire, spit of stoked

flame, found it at the same time – isn't this a kind
of kissing? – & squished a tomato out. Believe me.
I watched it fall like a wound unearthed from body

& looked as they bent together to pick it from
the ground, each begging the other to eat it & taste
more the sidewalk than anything else. It went on

like this until they forgot about the world, I’d say,
& kissed not knowing, as I often think, that even
a honeymoon on a boat so swift with sails can float

on rough seas. They were wearing backpacks
& stumbled awkwardly with all they carried but still
they pawed like dogs, all tongue & slobber, wound up

in the possibility of forever. Sometimes I feel old
& in such feeling feel some steady dwindling
of my joy. But I walked away, smiling. How could I

not? The sun hung like a prom dress in the sky
& even the train’s metallic rattling seemed a part
of the great big music making that is the world.

All night I thought about this & even now,
as I write, I think of my old friend & his giddy 
wide-eyed love, fingers pedaling long a guitar

until he found a sound that sounds like kissing
feels. & so for you, all of you little blades of grass
peeking child-like at this world of loss & love,

I wish you nights where even the city’s distant
blaring sings like music, where the rain sweetens
this world’s howling to a whisper, where in those seconds

you feel alone, you find in the stars the eyes of everyone 
you love & know you won't ever be, not once,
not ever, no, never, not like that again. & yes,

I wish you pizza that never burns your mouth 
& another shirt for all the shirts you stain. 
I wish, most of all, that everything reminds you 

of what you already have & that when it does,
you watch it on your toes, eyes open & clear, 
taking in all these children kissing & the whole 

grasp of what they do not know & for what 
even we are never prepared – the fight against 
the kitchen counter, the grandmother passing on, 

the clock’s slow & steady second hand rhythm,
how I was once held on an old couch knowing 
it might be the last time I’d ever be held like that

again, & again, & oh, all this wrestling with everything 
we will forever know as loss, before you laugh 
like children do – beautiful & often – & kiss each other.

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A Recurring Note:

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