Love in Time
All About Love: New Visions. Have you read this book? bell hooks. Have you heard of her? She is the author of All About Love published in 2000 by HarperCollins. Yes, the date of publication is over twenty years old. That doesn’t matter. hooks covers thirteen kinds of love, and only one of them is romantic. Isn’t that interesting? Do you agree that “love” is almost always defined as romantic? Isn’t that what most people yearn for, whether or not they find something or someone that matches their expectations. hooks’ types of love include the divine love found in spirituality, redemptive love (healing), and even greed, a form of love. You’ll just have to read that chapter to understand hook’s take on this type of love. We strongly recommend this book if the subject of love interests you.
The runners up for love’s attractions may be love for siblings, children, parents, friends, and so on. Then there is love for other sentient beings – animal companions and those who live wild and follow their own instincts and who feel pleasure and pain as we do.
The list of love types is long and inclusive. Importantly, divine and spiritual love have the potential to transform us. Perhaps this is the most intriguing type of love of all.
My favorite lines from today’s set of poems is Mr. Shanahan’s “The clock reads the time/Because we set it.” This harks back to Einstein’s conclusion that “time is an illusion.” Is this space where lovers live out their actual or fantasy lives?
Today’s post is the final one on the theme of “Time.” Next week, we begin a series focusing on “Nature”, which will feature another poem from the Any-Time poets’ group. So, watch for that. It’s a good one.
William Shakespeare
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Sonnet 19 is one of 154 sonnets published in 1609 by playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The sonnet addresses time directly, as it allows time its great power to destroy all things in nature, but the poem forbids time to erode the “young man’s fair appearance. The theme is redemption, through poetry, of time's inevitable decay. Though there is the implication that the young man himself will not survive time's effects, because redemption brought by the granting of everlasting youth is not actual, but rather ideal or poetic.
By Frank X Walker
When pheromones, ignited by the promise
in her come-and-get-it smile, our kinetic skin,
and my hunger, sing to our son of how he got here
and why it all started, he finds a way to prove
umbilical cords are longer than desire.
He cries I just want you, and everything planned
or selfish and hard, in her, melts and is put on hold.
Something in the ether, in the dark or in our eyes
warns my mini me that another hymn could be made
in this moment. He remembers he does not share,
wedges his head into our groove, almost reprising
his birth. Like a wrestler needing to break a figure-four
leg lock or spill the Milk and Water Embrace,
he forces a submission, but we are patient and wait.
The Poet’s Comment:
“This poem is the result of my attempt to articulate the challenge of keeping romance and intimacy alive while parenting younger children; and how our four-year-old has forced us to reconsider what qualifies as romance; and how we now choose to express our love for each other.”
—Frank X Walker
by Angelina Weld Grimke
Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,
The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path
To the same well-worn rock;
The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun
The same tints, – rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey
Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;
Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to
a point;
Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,
Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,
Watching, watching, watching me;
The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will
dusk after dusk;
The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the
night, chin on knees
Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly
miserable –
The eyes of my Regret.
Comment:
A rumination on lost love – the dark side of the lover’s moon. This unrhymed sonnet traverses the landscape of guilt “imprinted on the blackened sky and holding her captive far into the night as she contemplates a crushing sense of failure and wasted opportunities. Yes, this, too, is love’s territory. Regret over time slowly saps the flame of life as it flickers and sputters under regret’s weight. Time may not heal this situation.
Tommye Blount
Not an act, I’m told, more a leave to live
where words have no leverage—I’ve a pile
of words. It was useful to hear actors
talk shop about how one doesn’t just act
but live the role—a trick into feeling
what doesn’t need said. I watch a cast now
from this seat next to no one asking me
what was said like these two do, one row up.
Once home, they’ll unwrap each other’s bow-tied
necks; mouths agape, marvel over their spoils
as if for the first time. Look at the way
one lowers the other’s mask, levies a kiss,
then worries back its curl over the usher
-hushed laugh, each needling the other to live.
The Poet’s Comments: Mr. Blount says, “For many reasons, I’ve lived my life never having experienced romantic love. Lust is easier for me, simpler. I mean, have I not already written so much about the d-word—desire and the other one?! Yes, I’ve had many experiences with lust, but love’s calculus is just as hard as writing this, or any sonnet, for me. With my modest ‘pile of words,’ I’ve troubled this poem, pulled apart its envoi to see what’s inside—in search of that thing many tell me they know so well.”
Charif Shanahan
The cog in the eye turns
Until there is nothing left
To discern. I sip tea
Steeped in a kind of lust—
If I say I am, you are, he/she/it is . . .
We don’t have to agree
But it requires, to mean,
A common rubric.
The clock reads the time
Because we set it. I mean,
How else? Who is anyone
Who is anyone?
The grass edges outline the grave:
Get to living!
BACKGROUND
Frank X Walker is author of A is for Affrilachia (The University Press of Kentucky, 2023), among other titles. The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), among other organizations, he served as the poet laureate of Kentucky from 2013–14. He lives in Lexington.
Angelina Weld Grimke, born on 27 February, 1889, was a journalist, playwright, and poet from Harlem Renaissance. Her work was collected in several Harlem Renaissance anthologies, including Negro Poets and Their Poems (The Association Publishers, 1923) and The New Negro (Atheneum, 1925). She died on 10 June 1958
Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books 2020). A Cave Canum fellow, his work has been supporte by Kresge Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Blount lives in New York.
Charif Shanahan is the author of Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023), and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Originally from the Bronx, Shanahan is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.
Exploration 1: Is Sonnet 19 addressed to a man or a woman or something else? Is Shakespeare’s choice significant?
Exploration 2: Given the chance, what would you say to “time” based on the last 5 posts on the subject?
Exploration 3: Can you define love passing in time? Which of the poems above best captures the essence of love as you experience it? Maybe none of them? Please send us any other poem about love that expresses the core of the experiences as you feel them. Your work or someone else’s with attribution.
Exploration 4: Sonnet 19 states that “My love shall in verse ever life young.” Can poems/words accomplish this. Compare to last week’s post https://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2023/02/27-feb-23-forgotten-in-time.html – 27 February 23.
Call for Poetry Submissions
Get your peacock pen out and create a poem about nature, however you define it. We will be glad to see what you’ve come up with. This is an open invitation throughout the coming months.
Let’s get on with today’s poems that focus on “Love and Time,” starting rather than ending with the Master, Bill Shakespeare. The “Qs” number the sonnet’s four-line quatrains.
ReplyDelete1. To a man, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
2. Bide a wee.
3. All of them at one time or another.
Well maybe not the Shakespeare.
4. Poems and all art can carry beauty through time. Look at the drawings in the caves. The drawings on the trains.