A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Like Our Bodies' Imprint - Yehuda Amichai

(*Depending on the speed of your internet connection, it may take a couple of minutes to load the first time. *)

"Passages IV" - Charcoal and acrylic by Elena Peteva. Now in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I fell in love with it, had my chance to acquire, vacillated, and by the time I decided ..... lost it. Both for its symbolism and my encounter with it as a love-and-life lesson on when heart and eye should out-vote the brain, there could be no other image more apropos.

"Love is the universal migraine" wrote Robert Graves in the poem "Symptoms of Love". And, like an actual migraine, it renders us paralyzed and wordless to describe: regardless of the stage (or state) of a "love connection"' we feel as though no one else has ever felt as we do. Since my first "migraine", poetry has been the palliative for its course. Exhilarated or despairing, elated or dumb-founded by an affaire de coeur, someone talented has expressed my feelings better, more vividly, eloquently, and passionately. My goal is to post one poem each day for a year as an exercise and meditation on the subject.

The poems come from a poetry collection accumulated over a life-time of marveling at the sometimes-madness-sometimes-misery of being in love but always always in awe of the mystery and hope, whether as the pursuer or the pursued.

In his poem "Amar" (To Love), which is posted here, Carlos Drummond de Andrade writes of the heart as being a bottomless reservoir of Love. He urges that we must continue to ladle it out, whether after a loss or when that Love has fallen on parched earth, because that's what we are meant to do - nay, we must do. No other poem speaks as much to me in encouraging that optimistic, hopeful view.

Part of my objective for the project is to see how re-reading, selecting, and commenting on so much "love poetry" would affect my own energy, spirit, receptivity, and capacity to love. It led - eventually- to a rumination about Love, which you can find here: “Talking About Love Is Like Dancing About Architecture” .

So, while you await the next lift-off, are already soaring or just barely crawling away from a crash, may these poems - by the gifted and the mad, the famous and the (somewhat) forgotten, spanning centuries and cultures - show you that your anguishes and ecstasies are shared and universal.

Intimations, Declarations, Persuasions, Celebrations, Separations, Desolation: these are the stages of a love affair, as characterized by Jon Stallworthy for his anthology of love poetry. I have followed the same protocol in tagging the poems here.

Harrison Tao
March 1, 2010

Since poets may be represented more than once, photos and biographical information will be only with the first posting of a poem by each. This site is quirky for navigating to a particular poet. They are listed in order of the number of their poems that I have selected.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Like Our Bodies' Imprint - Yehuda Amichai

(#6 here from Yehuda Amichai.) It's obvious by now that I like his poetry. A lot. Read the others - just click on his name in the side-bar - and you'll begin to see why. His poems get to the essence and the core with not one extra word. Meeting him that one time and knowing a bit about his life and his writing, he looked to embody a line by Aeschylus: "The reward of suffering is experience". And a lifetime supply of fodder for poems. This one.... this one overwhelmed me on first reading and, even now, decades later, still stuns with its powerful imagery of negative space to show the fullness of what once was.
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Like our bodies’ imprint
                                                         transl. by Assia Gutmann
Like our bodies’ imprint
not a sign will remain that we were in this place.
The world closes behind us,
the sand straightens itself.

Dates are already in view
in which you no longer exist,
already a wind blows clouds
which will not rain on us both.

And your name is already on the passenger lists of ships
and in the registers of hotels
whose names alone
deaden the heart.

The three languages I know,
all the colors in which I see and dream:

None will help me.

                                                                                  Yehuda Amichai- Israeli

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