It was to be a love poem

By
Mary Buchinger
-

++++++++++++all of it,
each letter on the page
was in my heart an epistle
of kindliness
++++++++what is it
that slips in
against intention

++++and which is more true
or all of it finally
++++++++the poem not
a bowl but a basket
+with openings that seep
and strands that hold

 



Click here to read Mary Buchinger on the origin of the poems.

Image by Angela Petrosyan on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

Mary Buchinger:

Intention is a curious thing when it comes to love and poetry. Both are perfect in their ideal form—in what I hope and aim for—and both are meaningless in the abstract. In the interaction between the ideal and the real, intention bumps up against the requirements, constraints, affordances of language, of persons, of feeling. The material world continually imposes itself, grounds us in what is. Perfection of intention is one thing, the actual poem, the actual expression of love, another. The words of the poem are like the strands of a basket, leaving space within the weaving for meaning to leak out or seep in. As T. S. Eliot writes in “The Hollow Men,” “Between the potency/And the existence/ Between the essence/And the descent/Falls the Shadow” –“the Shadow” haunts this poem.

Mary Buchinger
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