You Drive Me Crazy

by Mary D. Esselman

  And if you can hold on through all this tottering back and forth, you may well come to the speaker's place in Eleanor Stanford's “On a Line by Petrarch.” She suggests that the language of love is not always fluent, that we may stumble over the right word or gesture, that “September leaves us shadows but no light.” But still, by the end of the poem, the speaker regains balance: “What I once loved I now love less./ But no; not light; not watching you, undressed.”

  Uncertainty in love is momentary and probably necessary, we believe. As Mark McMorris suggests in “Elegy for Love,” a loving relationship will move from “honey-eyed” bliss to shadow and back to “bright afternoons of elms.” So don't get stuck on one bad night, your dysfunctional-family history, or the occasional power shifts between the two of you. Understand that a love worth keeping is not static, and that we can leave uncertainty and return to stability. In fact, we can move from shadow to light, from loving less to loving more.

  In Former Days We'd Both Agree

  In former days we'd both agree

  That you were me, and I was you.

  What has now happened to us two,

  That you are you, and I am me?

  BHARTRHARI (TRANS. JOHN BROUGH)

  Talking in Bed

  Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

  Lying together there goes back so far,

  An emblem of two people being honest.

  Yet more and more time passes silently.

  Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest

  Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

  And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

  None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

  At this unique distance from isolation

  It becomes still more difficult to find

  Words at once true and kind,

  Or not untrue and not unkind.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  Girls

  You girls who were seeking

  the great love, the great and terrible love,

  what has happened, girls?

  Perhaps

  time, time!

  Because now,

  here it is, see how it passes

  dragging the heavenly stones,

  destroying flowers and leaves,

  with a noise of foam lashed

  against all the stones of your world,

  with a smell of sperm and jasmine,

  next to the bleeding moon!

  And now

  you touch the water with your little feet,

  with your little heart

  and you do not know what to do!

  Better are

  certain night journeys,

  certain compartments,

  certain most amusing walks,

  certain dances with no greater consequence

  than to continue the journey!

  Die of fear or of cold,

  or of doubt,

  for I with my huge steps

  will find her,

  within you

  or far from you,

  and she will find me,

  she who will not tremble in the face of love,

  she who will be fused

  with me

  in life or death!

  PABLO NERUDA (TRANS. DONALD D. WALSH)

  Because my mother and father…

  Because my mother and father

  hurt each other

  I will abandon you

  sooner or later

  somebody will learn

  from the experience

  that imitation

  has nothing to do

  with flattery.

  KATE BINGHAM

  Nantucket

  Flowers through the window

  lavender and yellow

  changed by white curtains—

  Smell of cleanliness—

  Sunshine of late afternoon—

  On the glass tray

  a glass pitcher, the tumbler

  turned down, by which

  a key is lying—And the

  immaculate white bed

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Biscuit

  The dog has cleaned his bowl

  and his reward is a biscuit,

  which I put in his mouth

  like a priest offering the host.

  I can't bear that trusting face!

  He asks for bread, expects

  bread, and I in my power

  might have given him a stone.

  JANE KENYON

  Last Night You Left Me and Slept

  Last night you left me and slept

  your own deep sleep. Tonight you turn

  and turn. I say,

  “You and I will be together

  till the universe dissolves.”

  You mumble back things you thought of

  when you were drunk.

  RUMI (TRANS. COLEMAN BARKS)

  I Wrung My Hands Under My Dark Veil

  I wrung my hands under my dark veil…

  “Why are you pale; what makes you reckless?”

  —Because I have made my loved one drunk

  with an astringent sadness.

  I'll never forget. He went out, reeling;

  his mouth was twisted, desolate…

  I ran downstairs, not touching the banisters,

  and followed him as far as the gate.

  And shouted, choking: “I meant it all

  in fun. Don't leave me, or I'll die of pain.”

  He smiled at me—oh so calmly, terribly—

  and said: “Why don't you get out of the rain?”

  ANNA AKHMATOVA (TRANS. MAX HAYWARD AND STANLEY KUNITZ)

  Terminal

  after the all too usual delays—

  crowded runway at LGA

  thunderstorms over ORD—

  you arrive here at MEE and

  I get the feeling

  I get the feeling yet again

  that I am but a connecting stop

  a hub

  some CLT or ATL or PIT

  you travel through

  not to

  pausing only to change planes and

  marking the time of your layover

  the weirdly dislocated hour(s)

  marking—not spending—it

  pacing my concourse

  skimming my newsstands

  bypassing my gift shops

  so anxious for your connection to

  some SFO or HNL or PAR

  a final destination

  which is and always has been

  somewhere someone else

  SAM HOLTZAPPLE

  Just a Sestina to You, Honey, Letting You Know What an Interesting Thing Happened to Me While You Were at Home Rubbing Your Wife's Back

  A martian fell out of the french windows into my bed last night

  He wasn't much different from you, honey, except the

  hair in his nose was green not brown and

  in his left hand he clutched a nine inch satellite dish

  (that's a little bigger honey than the one you clutch)—any

  way he apologized for dropping in like that—I asked him to stay

  you know, chat for a while—life, love, lipstick—so he did stay

  actually he ended up spending the night

  (in case you're wondering honey, no, he didn't get any)

  we just sat around thumbwrestling and well the

  night was getting hot so I got us a dish

  of butter pecan ice cream—he really lapped it up

  like a native, honey, and

  then as we played a rousing game of Twister on my deck, he looked up and

  noticed that the Christmas lights were still up, in March. They stay

  up (I said) because I've got a married lover (that's you, my little dish)

  so every day is Christmas, hooray! (honey I didn't say how every night

  is Easter how you've crucified me baby) I could see he liked me, the

  dish he held, he clutched a little harder a
nd asked if there were any

  chance for his little old martian self to experience any

  Earthly love. I have some single friends (I replied) and

  they're pretty desperate (not like me honey) the

  chances are good they wouldn't kick you out of bed—stay

  with one of them and pretty soon one night

  you'll get to try out that nine inch satellite dish

  in a way you haven't thought of; not many women get nine inches of dish

  (I told him), matter of fact some women don't get any.

  (that's where I'm lucky, right honey?) The hot night

  grew cold, so we stopped hanging by our ankles from the deck and

  came in and then I saw his suitcases (there, by the bed) You can't stay

  (I said) My married lover could be by to see me any month now and the

  place has to be empty. I might not even be here (I said) but the

  (I was JUST KIDDING, honey) martian got huffy, packed up his dish,

  asked politely to use my phone to call a cab, said he wouldn't dream of stay

  ing and messing up my affairs. I asked the martian if there were any

  thing else he wanted to know. Yes he said, How is life here on lovely Earth and

  I said Wake up—it sucks! Take me away, into the night

  (I said) but by then it was morning the sun was mooning us so any

  way he left (alone) (taking his nine inch dish) and I sat in my kitchen and

  poached some eggs. Why didn't I go with him, why do I stay (but honey here I

  am, dishless and cold, waiting for you to come any day any night)

  CAROLYN CREEDON

  Surprise

  My heart went fluttering with fear

  Lest you should go, and leave me here

  To beat my breast and rock my head

  And stretch me sleepless on my bed.

  Ah, clear they see and true they say

  That one shall weep, and one shall stray

  For such is Love's unvarying law

  …I never thought, I never saw

  That I should be the first to go;

  How pleasant that it happened so!

  DOROTHY PARKER

  On a Line by Petrarch

  What I once loved I now love less.

  September leaves us shadows

  but no light. I watch you undress,

  your body edged in darkness.

  Miles on the stereo, those notes

  that I once loved, and now love less—

  the glint of anger they suppress

  turns a kind of airless blue,

  admits no light. I watch you undress

  your gestures of significance,

  and leave me at a loss to know

  what I once loved. I now love less

  than fluently, am forced to guess

  at curve of neck and arch of brow.

  But not at light. I watch you without redress

  to sound or sense. The needle lifts

  at last from the refrain, its echo:

  What I once loved I now love less.

  But no; not light; not watching you, undressed.

  ELEANOR STANFORD

  Elegy for Love

  We have passed through bodies

  into a bright afternoon of elms

  poured over the budding limbs

  honey-eyed until blind from the sun

  which stayed before us

  and darkened the coming minutes.

  MARK MCMORRIS

  Misery

  WHEN LOVE STINKS

  Misery makes uncertainty look good. Uncertainty was temporary—an alienated evening or two, a few days of watching him defer to his mother, a leaden dinner party—but ultimately you knew that love was intact and would return. Misery feels never-ending—days, weeks (or even months), of avoiding his eyes and touch. You may know what the problem is: You're simply too stressed from work and kids and endless chores to make time for each other; or perhaps you suspect an affair or are contemplating one yourself. Even worse, you don't know why your great love has turned to the sad and uncomfortable encounters with a stranger described so chillingly in János Pilinszky's “Relationship.”

  The poet John Milton describes a marriage gone sour as “a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption,” and poet Carolyn Creedon says that a bad relationship feels like a “lovely, broken experiment.” Either way, for the first time, you're really afraid that the oft-quoted “half of all marriages end in divorce” (and probably more than half of live-in relationships) statistic applies to you.

  It is not necessarily true that every relationship reaches this wretched point, but if you find yourself in this dark place, we think that reading these poems can help you figure out where you are and what you really want—they can actually help you assess your unhappiness. Perhaps you will recognize yourself in the comic exasperation of Marie Howe's “Marriage” and not in the tragedy of Sylvia Plath, but in either case this recognition can lead you toward the knowledge that the two of you need help.

  In William Carlos Williams's “The Ivy Crown,” the speaker says that in love, “no doubts are permitted”; still, he warns us, they will come anyway, and if we are not careful, they “may before our time overwhelm us.” We think that these poems will help us face our doubts straight on—perhaps before we are overwhelmed by them and love is irrevocably lost.

  Both “The More You Ruv Someone,” from Avenue Q, and Marie Howe's “Marriage” are horribly funny—and they both suggest that the flip side of any grand passion may well be rage. As the Avenue Q puppet character Christmas Eve tells fellow puppet character Kate Monster, “The more you love someone/The more you wishing/him dead!/Sometime you look at/him and only see fat and lazy./And wanting baseball bat/for hitting him on his head!”

  In Marie Howe's “Marriage,” we are invited to feel a certain sympathy for the “strong woman” driven to bash her husband over the head with a bayonet. But maybe, these poems suggest, rage and despair can be overcome. In “The More You Ruv Someone,” we see that passion is intact, and perhaps the speaker in “Marriage” is simply warning us that too many evenings given over to the Discovery Channel can spark temporary insanity.

  But perfection isn't the answer, either, Dorothy Parker tells us in the ironically titled “Love Song.” In fact, a bit of “fat and lazy” might be preferable to a guy who is “strong and bold,” as “jubilant as a flag unfurled,” and who lives “where the sunbeams start.” The speaker is bored, bored, bored with all this sweetness and light. In fact, she wishes “somebody'd shoot him.” If his imperfections are making us miserable, Parker's sly little poem advises us that even if perfection were possible (and of course, it isn't), we would still have times when we wished we'd “never met him.”

  Okay, so we have (we hope) drawn you into this section with poems that leaven our anger, frustration, and despair with a bit of humor (see Gavin Ew art's “Ending” and Louise Glück's “Telemachus ' Detachment”). In Sylvia Plath's “The Rival” and Elizabeth Ash Vélez's “Cardinal Points,” no one is laughing. They both describe relationships that are airless, “drugged,” and false. “The Rival” fairly hums with the unhappiness of its speaker. Her “spiteful” lover—her rival (do recall that Plath's husband was fellow poet Ted Hughes)—is “beautiful, but annihilating.” The home they share is a “mausoleum,” where dissatisfactions are “as expansive as carbon monoxide” (and do recall that Plath killed herself after her marriage to Hughes fell apart). About as grim a love poem as you'll ever find.

  The speaker in Vélez's “Cardinal Points” yearns for her past, a time when even the notion of winter was glamorous to her, when she read books in “a fever.” Now she feels like a character in a bad play; even her beloved books have become props in the creaking plot of her empty marriage. We hope that you don't recognize your life in these poems, but if you do, then it's time to talk, to see a therapist, to try again, or even to leave. Most of
us have already learned that not every romance is meant to have a “happily ever after.” But we also know that some relationships survive betrayal, separation, and outright war (Bill and Hillary appear to soldier on).

  Katharyn Howd Machan and Emily Dickinson suggest that at least part of our misery can be caused by our stubborn and unexamined belief in the fairytale myth of true love, which leads to impossible expectations. So in “Hazel Tells LaVerne,” we get a wonderful and funny deconstruction of the frog-who-needs-a-kiss-to-be-a-prince story:

  an he says

  kiss me just kiss me

  once on the nose

  well i screams

  ya little green pervert

  an i hitsm with my mop

  And we think, yes, if your relationship is based on that particular fairy-tale model—if you believe that you can turn a frog into a prince and you'll live happily ever after—well, you don't necessarily have to hit him with your mop, but you probably should either radically readjust your expectations or move on.

  Understanding that your pain is caused by impossible expectations is, in a strange way, a healthy kind of misery. The trick is not to give up on the reality of imperfect, human love. The speaker in Kate Bingham's “Sex” has given up. But we say no, you've experienced the “sweet impossible blossom” of ecstatic love and can reject your mother's horrifying advice that sex is the “closest a man and a woman could get/to wanting the same thing at the same time,” and that “this was love.”

  Louise Bogan's advice in “Knowledge” is better than the mom's in Bingham's poem, we think. Even if it seems you've learned that “treasure is brittle” and “passion warms little,” don't give up on love. Let yourself lie back and reflect on something more distant from your pain—how “the trees make a long shadow/And a light sound,” for example.

  So read these poems and take measure of your misery. Having faced what William Carlos Williams calls the “cruel and selfish and totally obtuse” part of love, you can, at least, decide where to go from here. We do know it's possible to get past the misery. In Jane Hirshfield's “Broken-Off Twig Budding Out in the Path,” something plops in the water. The speaker says that it may be “nothing/that swims,/nothing that hops, or hopes.” Or it may be “a thing/like this stick—/its red buds swelling out/in spite of what it/ought to know,/in spite of where it ought to be.” This poem tells us that spring (even misplaced) will always survive the misery of winter, and that love, like a “quickened water sprout,” can survive a season of unhappiness.