The thought hits me in the middle
of the day:
I
am your glacier over the woods, so pale.
I
am your third arm, the bird
that flutters against your window
in
the morning, the immeasurable cold
drawn
up without a distant moon.
Somehow
with stars,
we drowse like white gardinias,
a
field with daisies and violets
between
throat and belly.
Listen.
I
put my mouth against your heart.
This love poem by Kate Kysar beautifully takes on the
difficult task of capturing the essence of erotic love. In it the speaker tries on a series of
metaphors to describe the relation between her and her lover, whom she is
addressing in the poem.
The first line lets us know the speaker is thinking of her
relation to the beloved after or before their lovemaking; “The thought hits me
in the middle of the day:” the poem begins, and we realize that even from this
vantage point the speaker is trying to find language that can match the
intensity and tenderness they have shared. Her first attempt is “I am your glacier…so pale.” Here she
succeeds finding a metaphor that gets at the color of their skin, but glaciers are
cold. They move slowly. So she
tries again: “I am your third arm/the bird that flutters against your window…”
Here she reaches for a metaphor that speaks to their interconnection. She is so close to him that she is
almost part of him, but lovers inhabit separate bodies, so that doesn't quite work, either. She thinks of a bird, alive and active
outside thew window. The bird poses a problem, too, though, because it is outside
the window, seeking a point of access.
The speaker tries again: “Somehow with stars” she begins, and we
can see that she is giving up on the effort to find a metaphor that
accurately captures the nature of the love she is trying to describe. The lovers have ended up with stars
“somehow” and this sense of doubt in language (can it successfully capture the
lovers?) continues as the speaker shifts from metaphor to simile. “We drowse like white gardinias” the
speaker goes on, abandoning the metaphor (they are not
flowers; they are like flowers).
Finally, after the most erotic line in the poem, when the
bodies become covered in flowers or perhaps become the field on which the
lovers lie, the speaker gives up.
She commands her lover to “Listen” and then, instead of speaking, she
presses her mouth to his body. In
this gesture she concedes. The passion cannot be captured in words; it is only articulated
through the body.
I think that move—from the command “listen” to the end of
speaking and the beginning of lovemaking—is breathtaking. In the poem's struggle toward articulation, the experience it describes is only captured when language is allowed to fail. Pretty damned cool.
If you'd like more information about Kate Kysar, go to
To buy Pretend the World, in which this poem appears:
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