Beauty #11

I love poetry.

Like everything that I love, I love it intensely, deeply, borderline obsessively. I (would) have bookshelves devoted specifically to poetry. I try to memorize one poem a year. When I'm having a terrible day, I listen to Auden or Eliot reading their work and it, well, not cheers me right up but certainly helps me settle things into their proper perspective.

I believe (with the exception of Eliot) that poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of. It should be something that you read and that--just for a moment--breaks you open. It should be something that pulls your heart out of your chest and forces you to look at it closely.

"Misgivings" by William Matthews does that to me.

Of course it does. I'm commitment-phobic. I intentionally keep people out of my life because I'm afraid of getting hurt. I only tell people about the bits of me that I think they'll like.

But. But. But.

I'll admit it quietly.

I want someone to share my life with.

William Matthews has somehow managed to reach into my brain (maybe just the brain of all slightly-neurotic young adults) and scoop out all of my apprehensions surrounding undoing the safety line and going top over teakettle for someone and put them into a poem (a poem that I have seem to have accidentally memorized). It's exactly the kind of gut-spillage that I look for in a poem, the exact kind of poem that makes me want to think about love and my life and the people who are in it.

My favorite line(s) are . . . well, wait. I don't want to spoil it. Bonus if you can correctly guess them.

***

"Misgivings"
William Matthews

Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.