During the holidays, many people turn toward home and thoughts of love. I found three poems that focus on these two intertwined notions: Home and Love.
The first one is Billy Collins’ poem in The New Yorker this week. It’s one of those wily love poems that says not one direct word about the relationship of the two lovers. Their relationship lingers in the background, the unexpressed joy of getting to share their lives together. Included in this joy, subtly intertwined, are the memories of the lives of their mutual friends who have passed before them.
I read “Downpour” as an ‘over-sixty’ poem, a glance at life in the twilight of a slowly fading memory. The narration seems to acknowledge that much of the couple’s lives are behind them. I don’t like the term ‘confessional poem,’ so perhaps we could call this a ‘self-reflective poem’ concerning the losses people encounter as they age, with a subtle love poem enclosed within. I especially like the ending, with its slow-walking narrator.
Downpour
Billy Collins
Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,
and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.
So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.
I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,
until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread.
It was pouring by then,
spilling, as they say in Ireland,
people splashing across the lot to their cars.
And that is when I set out,
walking slowly and precisely,
a soaking-wet man
bearing bags of groceries,
walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.
I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head.
I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,
plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.
Along with “Downpour” I’m including this with a recent poem from YourDailyPoem.com, which the website’s editor, Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, discovered in the work of “The Bard of the Yukon,” Robert Service. The poem strikes me as remarkable in its repetitive focus and the Scotsman’s courage to break his iambic pentameter scansion in the last lines of each stanza to emphasize the poem’s theme. “Love” and “Home” are, to me, extremely strong words. Because of their power, people sometimes use them without the thought they deserve. Robert Service, in three eight-line stanzas (octaves), uses repetition for emphasis. Rather than employing the title words easily, Service dives into them deeply, noting in the center of the poem that one without the other can be most inadequate.
Home without Love is bitterness;
Love without Home is often pain.
The middle stanza is the only one that deals with the possibility that someone might not have both Home and Love, concluding with “If you win one you must have two.” The first and last stanzas assume that the ‘you,’ the reader, has both, mingling in concert with one another.
Home and Love
Robert Service
Just Home and Love! the words are small
Four little letters unto each;
And yet you will not find in all
The wide and gracious range of speech
Two more so tenderly complete:
When angels talk in Heaven above,
I’m sure they have no words more sweet
Than Home and Love.
Just Home and Love! it’s hard to guess
Which of the two were best to gain;
Home without Love is bitterness;
Love without Home is often pain.
No! each alone will seldom do;
Somehow they travel hand and glove:
If you win one you must have two,
Both Home and Love.
And if you’ve both, well then I’m sure
You ought to sing the whole day long;
It doesn’t matter if you’re poor
With these to make divine your song.
And so I praisefully repeat,
When angels talk in Heaven above,
There are no words more simply sweet
Than Home and Love.
The third poem is one of mine, describing how a young couple comes “Home” to a world from which it appears “Love” might have taken a holiday. Rather than being a “over-sixty” poem, it is a poem of the option-laden confusion of midlife. I wrote it after my wife at the time and I returned from a week at The Squaw Valley Community of Writers—it portrays the couple’s re-entry into a less artistic, more prosaic world.
The narration lacks the wisdom of the poems of Collins and Service. If “Coming Home Late in a Marriage” has a saving grace, it would lie in its knowing that it is unsure. Lacking the wisdom of “Downpour” and “Home and Love,” the narration makes iterative attempts to make sense of the uncharted seas of midlife but can relate only transient facts and unresolved questions.
Coming Home Late in a Marriage
Kevin Arnold
Nose around the small costly house.
You open all the shutters, I’ll open all the doors.
Has the neighbor-girl kept the dogs fed?
Look, on the patio—at least they have water.
I’ll sort quickly through the mail.
Damn, we’re overdrawn, that check didn’t clear.
Granta says they’re “seriously considering” a story.
And three rejection slips—two for me, one for you
Never thought I’d miss the dogs so.
Bigger and Terrier are looking old, is that heat-rash?
Puppy Molly has grown again—
I never should have left her, so young.
I’ll go out for milk.
What else do the kids need to get through tomorrow?
How does it feel being back?
Is there beer?
Any word from Mom or her nursing home?
Check the answering machine.
The Visa-lady only gave us till the twenty-fifth.
Chit-chat nervous as a couple before a funeral.
