Amazing the layers of honesty, the strata of life. Life, and love particularly, always extends beyond our immediate perceptions. A poem like this reminds us even sorrow is sometimes precious.
Holy Cow!! What a superb and heart-wrenching poem! The kind that sweeps your feet from under you, then you find more magic and pathways each time you re-read it. I so hope (and am praying) that the speaker was able to repair that marriage!! Now I’m going to start the re-reads!
Yes, it is So heart wrenching—I’ve known too many people stuck in just such an arrangement between love and exhaustion. Thankfully, my marriage has a lot more love, but I know that the exhaustion—and the heavy sadness—is real also…amazing poem!
I once had a fiction prof who said, ‘If you’re gonna have metaphorical birds in a story, they must first appear as literal birds.’ For me, this ‘rule’ sometimes applies to poetry, sometimes not. I love how this tight big/little narrative poem obeys that ‘rule.’ The tooth is literal and metaphor. So are the cow sculptures. The sandwich. The dentist. Perhaps even the paddle board.
Amazing the layers of honesty, the strata of life. Life, and love particularly, always extends beyond our immediate perceptions. A poem like this reminds us even sorrow is sometimes precious.
Holy Cow!! What a superb and heart-wrenching poem! The kind that sweeps your feet from under you, then you find more magic and pathways each time you re-read it. I so hope (and am praying) that the speaker was able to repair that marriage!! Now I’m going to start the re-reads!
Yes, it is So heart wrenching—I’ve known too many people stuck in just such an arrangement between love and exhaustion. Thankfully, my marriage has a lot more love, but I know that the exhaustion—and the heavy sadness—is real also…amazing poem!
What a time for a poem with acetaminophen in it ha
Sweet and compelling... I find myself in the love described, aching at the thought of loss.
'to give me what I wanted but in the way you wanted to give' 🙌🏼
I once had a fiction prof who said, ‘If you’re gonna have metaphorical birds in a story, they must first appear as literal birds.’ For me, this ‘rule’ sometimes applies to poetry, sometimes not. I love how this tight big/little narrative poem obeys that ‘rule.’ The tooth is literal and metaphor. So are the cow sculptures. The sandwich. The dentist. Perhaps even the paddle board.
So good.
Quite a nice poem! Thank you for this one.