You Will Love Again the Stranger Who Was Your Selfã¢â‚¬â

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—have turns prescribing the perfect poems to friction match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line.

© original analogy by Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

I was betrayed this past twelvemonth by someone I deeply loved and trusted, and whom I idea loved and trusted me. The experience felt almost surgically, cruelly precise in the way it mapped onto my history of trauma, then I take been triggered while too overwhelmed with loss. This betrayal has been deeply unsettling to my sense of myself, my ability to trust others, and my belief in the possibility of dearest and partnership in the time to come. I am struggling to find myself again. Do you accept a poem for me?

Sincerely,
Lost at Sea

Love Lost at Sea,

I'm then sorry you're experiencing this painful and destabilizing betrayal. Every bit Kaveh crucially reminded u.s.a., a poem lone is bereft support equally we work through our histories of trauma. Not as a remedy, then, merely as resource in what I hope is a vast constellation of support, I offering yous Derek Walcott's "Love After Honey."

The time will come up
when, with bliss,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other'southward welcome,
and say, sit down here. Eat.

You will beloved once more the stranger who was your cocky.

Revel in the declarative stability of that affirmation: "You will love again the stranger who was your self." It's a cannonball from the other side of this wreckage. Read it aloud to yourself. Hear the truth in your own voice, and forge an opening toward that future.

Give wine. Give staff of life. Requite back your eye
to itself, to the stranger who has loved yous

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

I dear these offset 2 imperatives. They are sufficiently pointed to penetrate the brume of grief, and however allusive enough for the holy and eternal ritual practice that is self-love. That tertiary imperative, though, feels a bit trickier. At first, "who knows you by middle" seems perhaps to refer to the other to whom you ceded parts of yourself. Read differently, it is "the stranger who has loved you // all your life … who knows yous past heart." Even when your attention was turned toward your relationship, you were at that place all along. You do know yourself by middle, Lost at Bounding main, even in those moments when you experience most at bay. Now, give the care you lot were giving away dorsum to yourself. Move from the cede and sustenance of bread and wine to the poem's opulent final directive: "Sit down. Feast on your life."

—CS

*

Dear Poets,

I'm simultaneously horrified and amazed past modern life. I bulldoze an astoundingly complex vehicle for three to four hours each mean solar day so that I can get to "work." The not-work that I practice gets me imaginary money (money is always imaginary). I use the imaginary money to pay for weird things, similar oddly colored liquids that energize me and wearing apparel fabricated from liquid found deep in the ground. Sometimes when I buy things, I don't even understand what they are fabricated of. Often I eat things, even though they don't seem similar food. Everything moves effectually me at lightning speed. Only I desperately want to tiresome down. I desire to make the things I need. I want to sleep under the sky. I want to bury myself in earth. I want to lookout every sunset. I want to see the globe exhale and I want to breathe with it.

But I can't exercise any of that. I have to pick the kids upward and go home and make the weird food and sleep in my weird box.

I feel similar a time traveler. Merely I'm just a suburban mom with a nine to five job. I clearly demand a poem.

Honey,
Longing for Slowness

Dear Longing for Slowness,

Sometimes I experience like I'one thousand treading water: forever trying to clear out my email inbox, endlessly accumulating errands, attending meetings upon meetings. But more than tedium, I hear in your letter a note of estrangement—a refusal to take for granted fifty-fifty the about ordinary object. In this style, your annotation is similar poetry. I love how poetry holds me at bay from even my native tongue. In poems, I get to ask: How can I enter the earth through sound? Through cadency? What else might this word mean? When I read a poem, I feel like a fish who learns the properties of h2o without ever leaving the ocean.

For you: Rita Dove's "Daystar," from her monumental collection Thomas and Beulah, which tells the story of an African American couple (loosely based on Dove's maternal grandparents) who came to Ohio during the Smashing Migration. Like you, Beulah craves space for her listen to unravel:

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes at that place were things to watch—
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf.

Beulah's unbounded excursions into the space of her mind are no less grand for their domestic constraints.

She had an hr, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the tiptop of the stairs.
And just what was female parent doing
out back with the field mice?
Why, building a palace.

Even when your twenty-four hours doesn't beget yous the slowness you lot crave, the simple and profound human activity of noticing can move yous, bit past bit, toward that interior lushness you're seeking.

—CS

*

Dear Poets,

I've been stumbling my way through a very modern, disruptive dating scene and getting all sorts of bruises, large and small, along the way. What I could really employ is a hopeful verse form, something about connection or honesty in an era where our phones make u.s. retrieve of others as dispensable.

Best,
Seeking Hope

Honey Seeking Hope,

Dating is hard! One matter I find specially intimidating about those first few dates is that connectedness requires vulnerability, but opening yourself likewise means the take a chance of beingness injure without recourse to the kind of accountability that builds with a partner over time. Be proud of your bruises. They are evidence that you've made yourself vulnerable to the possibility of connection. There are no guarantees, but there is no other way. I hope that your openness will soon exist met past someone who is equipped to hold it gently. For and so and for now, Chen Chen's "Winter" is a reminder that intimacy is non the same as the curated images on our phones. Chen's dearest poem opens:

Large smelly bowel movements this blue Jan morning time

In Chen's poem—like in the body, similar in a full relationship—the erotic and quotidian and health and illness share a site.

I mean, one wintertime night I got ill & pooped the bed.
& he just got up with me.

Helped strip the sheets, carry information technology all to the washer.

I kept saying, I'm and so sorry, shivering, I'm then, I'grand sorry. But he said, What? Hey. I love yous.

Chen has said that "a teacher said, never to use the word poop in a poem," only I can't call back of anything more gorgeously rule breaking than catastrophe a poem with "I dearest yous." What makes this "I love you" poetry and non a Hallmark card and non a inexpensive platitude is the messiness of the world Chen builds around it. By the fourth dimension we reach the poem's finish, the "I honey you" doesn't snap like a flimsy thing. This is a love committed to being there, together, in the beautiful mess.

—CS

Desire more than? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx.Demand a poem? Write to usa. Adjacent week, Kaveh Akbar volition exist answering questions.

Claire Schwartz is the author ofbound. Her poetry has appeared inApogee, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, andPrairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews accept appeared inThe Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review,and elsewhere.

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Source: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/19/poetry-rx-you-will-love-again-the-stranger-who-was-your-self/