Friday, March 12, 2010
Love or Detach
Love or Detach
You've seen this sick before. Lived yoked inside its
slow-burn grip--a guilty, healthy twin. Seen a life,
seen people, everything just fall away in layers;
begin to slough them off yourself to keep a step ahead.
The books, the therapists, the groups all counsel
"detachment with love." You try. You fail. You try.
Sometimes there is only love or detach.
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So here we are again, your poem says. In the sickness. You wonder do we ever really leave it?
ReplyDeleteHow familiar, how awful, how's it possible?
Well because we’re okay, and we feel bad about that—why should some of us be okay and others not? Why can’t we all be okay? Because we can’t. (fifteen extra points for getting twin in there, Gemini).
But that knowledge won’t stop us, will it? Because we've been there more than once, it’s almost like we think we know what to do, how to make it right. How many times have I tried and tried with my....fill it in.
That’s the best part of this poem for me: that underneath all this knowledge of the right thing to do, all this knowledge that it cannot be fixed, the losses must be cut, the boundaries made, the love sent toward something else, that can take it (detach, detach!) there’s a brilliant undertow sneaking around in places (you try repeated twice but fail only once, as if refusing to - the searching in the fifth line for what the speaker needs to hear) - the way we know what must be done but ignore (deny?) because guilt (or you could call this hopefulness, or human futility) is stronger than knowledge, is stronger/more powerful than the best/right thing to do. We have to try.
Then you give it to us plain and simple: you absolutely know what to do. Love or detach. And this is such a subtle shift, grammatically, from detachment with love. But the idea of it is completely different: detachment with love is sort of a way to create room - to love, and stay or love and go. But Love or Detach is asking you to make a choice - neither one of which will feel, in any way, good, or right (detach with no love, or love with no detachment – either scenario is ouch.). It will simply be what must be done. And it can feel like a hatchet has severed you from the yoke. Or a blow torch has fused you to it.
PERFECT iambic heptameter in the third line. Those are the lines SP. You pull them out of God knows where and they bore in and you can't get them out. So good. It's the stuff. Also, so in love with guilty healthy twin seen a life/ seen people, everything....mmmmm.
Four! Holy Toledo!
I meant perfect hepta in first of second stanza. I love that line so much.
ReplyDeleteeither scenario is ouch!
ReplyDelete