A month of poets: today, Marie Howe
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll feature a poem here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in April. Any reflections on today’s selection?
“After the Movie”
from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie HoweMy friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.
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I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day
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when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.
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I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.
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I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart.
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I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?
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We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him.
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Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.
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Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.
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Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.
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Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought—
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again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.
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What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are a nun.”
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Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he’s not thinking them?
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Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,
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we both know the winter has only begun.
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