Two Poems About Heartbreak

Two poems about heartbreak to read and re-read as needed. Bitterness with energy.

Feistiness. These women won't take no shit though their pain seems infinite. I like to imagine that I am as tough, as capable, or could be.

Poem about heartbreak that go on and on

bad love last like a big

ugly lizard crawl around the house

forever

never die

and never change itself

into a butterfly

- June Jordan

Don't Let's Talk About Being in Love

Don't let's talk about being in love, OK?

- about me being in love, in fact, OK?

about your bloated face, like a magnolia;

about marsupials,

whose little blunted pouches

I'd like to crawl inside, lips first;

about the crashing of a million waterfalls

- as if LOVE were a dome of glass beneath a lake

entered through a maze of dripping tunnels

I hoped and prayed I'd never be found inside.

At night I dream that your bedroom's crammed with ducks.

You smell of mashed-up meal and scrambled egg.

Some of the ducks are broody, and won't stand up.

And I dream of the fingers of your various wives

reaching into your private parts like beaks.

And you're lying across the bed like a man shouldn't be.

And I'm startled awake by the sound of creaking glass

as if the whole affair's about to collapse

and water come pouring in with a rush of fishes

going slurpetty-slurpetty-slurp with their low-slung mouths.

- Selma Hill

(Despair)

Just two brief excerpts, things that I can and cannot say; because I have slept and must go out, have had my coffee and my yogurt parfait, though they neglected to bring me toast; because someday we must all die; there is always, at the end, loss; and light, and the absence of light, and tissues caught on barbed wire blowing beside the field; and sheep who gather around, and bulls; and photographs of rivers and the Eiffel Tower, and the churches and the gargoyles in their places glowing yellow; and I was able to touch, alone, the inky dark of the Seine; and will be off again, will see sky again, even sunsets from the tops of clouds.

"I love you first because you wait, because

For your own sake, I cannot write

Beyond these words. I love you for these words

That sting and creep like insects and leave filth.

(…)

And all your imperfections and perfections

And all your magnitude of grace

And all this love explained and unexplained

Is just a breath."

- from V-Letter, by Karl Shapiro

"Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist- slack they may be- these last strands of man

In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day to come, not choose not to be."

- from Carrion Comfort, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Waking"

"The Waking" by Theodore Roethke:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

Blackbirds

"Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

- from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", by T.S. Eliot, of course

My only recollection of this poem, until I read it again recently, was the line about daring to eat a peach, and the idea that the love song was not addressed to any woman, but from J.A.P. to himself. I probably did not connect with it when I read it years ago because I was not old, I had no sense that I would ever grow old, and of course I dared to eat a peach, of course I dared disturb the universe - what could possibly be the problem? I thought I was being very non-conformist and free when I was younger but I imagine now that I was as constrained and needy as anyone, rushing to become an adult and prove myself. It is only in middle age that we are able to see the span of life behind us, the span of life yet to come, and can understand our place, and where we might yet go.

I am in love with J. Alfred Prufrock.

He has loved and does love all sorts of women, and himself.

It is not so simple.

When I was thirteen I was infatuated with Erin MacDonald, my gorgeous best friend, who introduced me to Duran Duran and Dokken and James Bond and Tennyson and S.E. Hilton and bad boys and angst. On Saturdays we sometimes biked out of town to the valley, where we found a path through a farmer's field to the woods and eventually to the muddy, twisting Assiniboine River. We would set out a blanket and snacks and read books and dance around and poke sticks at the river bank and imagine that we lived in a different world. This was our poem:

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

That's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost. We found it in "The Outsiders", and memorized it, and often quoted it back to each other. We knew that it applied to us, to our youth; we knew that what we had there in the woods or in each others' basements or walking along the train tracks or in our classrooms passing notes was something transient and special; and yet we ached to grow up, to gain knowledge and experience, to part.

Why is all beauty transient?

"Why must all good things come to an end?" - Nellie Furtado.

Probably time to wrap it up when I start quoting Nellie Furtado. Though that song's quite catchy, as is "I'm like a bird; I wanna fly away" - sticks in one's brain.

To redeem myself for that I will leave off with a bit from my favorite poem EVER, though it does not make me cry, though I suppose someday it might; no, no, I can't see it; it's only ever made me laugh, or shiver with excitement:

From "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens:

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

Seriously! Isn't that hilarious?

Actually it's much funnier when you read all thirteen. So here's another:

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

And another:

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

Okay, last one:

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

Brilliant!

Egypt

Good, well up more mystery

in the hall for singing well

that's not really a choice

then is it she said

into the phone (I had never

met her or her still songs)

God, the bookshelves

stacked & stooping

God, the poet's bare thighs empty

fuck the heavy knuckles of sleep,

sick time, floor boards,

driving cloud over the well

with screws no pictures

hanging no condensation

to boot, street mats

stock boys & my sisters' bathing suits

flung off & my brothers' inner tubes

wrapped up send my baby off

in reeds send him off

to meet the queen

I want to be the queen

or fuck to sleep

or fuck to walk

together down the dark hall

to the door at the end of the hall

& say father, what son

& say mother, what daughter

& then out of the fluid dream

to feel your arm, sliding firm

to wake me up again

Paris

First off, I do a lot of crying lately. Poems sometimes help. Sometimes they amplify the sobbing, and that helps. Other times they quiet me, or wrestle me down, or serve to pin me up as if to a corkboard in a public hallway, my pain on display. Regardles, a good poem helps. Reading "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker I have become excited again about romantic, rhyming poetry, and have ordered Sara Teasdale's collected poems from Amazon, and later might order Mary Oliver's new and collected poems, and will read Emily Dickinson again, when I get a spare minute. I have not, recently, been blessed with many spare minutes - but perhaps that in itself is a blessing. When I have nothing to do, I am prone to despair. I am like a fly caught against a window, a swatter hovering dangerously nearby; I must keep moving.

Here's a bit of a poem by Sara Teasdale, that helps:

O shaken flowers, o shimmering trees,
O sunlit white and blue,
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you.

Sara Teasdale, who apparently sometimes suffered from something called imeros - a kind of sexual craving for romance, or lust for love, and died one day after taking morphine in the bath, also wrote:

I will make this world of my devising
out of a dream in my lonely mind
I shall find the crystal of peace,
above me
stars I shall find.

The narrator of "The Anthologist" mentions that Sara's friend Orrick Johns, who wrote about the whiteness of plum blossoms at night, killed himself, too, "and later Edna St. Vincent Millay fell down the stairs. So the rhymers all began dying out." And of course there was Sylvia Plath and so on but I will get into that later.

Last weekend I drank so much that I lost consciousness in the bathtub and came to with water in my mouth and nose. I thought, "So that's how Jim Morrison died, in Paris; nothing more to it than that, probably," and then I fell asleep again and woke up again choking and then finally made it out and into a towel and naked into my bed.

This weekend I am working, so, guaranteed, it will not happen again.