LOVE POEM BY TODD SWIFT, VALENTINE'S DAY 2014

LOVE

They say love comes in threes.

Such trilogies extend

Times into books four to seven.

Erupt into eight in dreams.

I’ve seen love compared

To what was once Heaven

And now belongs to lies.

Also, love appears in songs

At intervals so regular

It must be true.

Always, the argument goes,

Love is the first, second, third

And final thing of value

In the singer’s world.

Mountains, friend

Are nothing

When the sea comes

Yet love will climb

Far above such lower levels.

Love is even, it has been said,

Delivered by the devil,

Or some equivalent minion,

From fat boy to lolling tart.

They hate love so much

They tend to kill it

With a dart

Drawn straight through

The designated heart.

I have seen dissection tables

In labs where trained

Believers in natural laws

Have torn a gazelle apart.

It feels like that,

The songs say,

Each time it beats its fluid out,

Drop by sustained drop;

It is worse than scalpels

At the chest cavity,

Cold as December,

To have love pulled out.

So odd a toxin,

It kills when going in

Or leaving the body.

Love is the little murderer

In cotton shorts

With wings

But love is also

The dove after slaughter

Who beyond battery

Arrives austere from Ararat to sing.

February 2014

Comments

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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