Cynthia Clifford

I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
By Vievee Francis

Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.

Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.

Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except for those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.

Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.

I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am.

It’s the week of Valentine’s Day, and I’m having my undergraduate students write sonnets and explore the magical love poem (or anti-love poem).

I often look to surrealist poets when it comes to passion, eroticism, and love poems because love is often a resistance to logic and sense-making. Surrealism in poetry does have sense if you read with all your senses.

Here is a surreal love poem from the French Surrealist poet Jacques-Bernard Brunius:

I Love

I love sliding I love upsetting everything
I love coming in I love sighing
I love taming the furtive manes of hair
I love hot I love tenuous
I love supple I love infernal
I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass
I love pearl I love skin
I love tempest I love pupil
I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer
I love oval I love struggling
I love shining I love breaking
I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth
I love blue I love known—knowing
I love lazy I love spherical
I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
I love to the left I love in the fire
I love because I love at the edges
I love forever many times just one
I love freely I love especially
I love separately I love scandalously
I love similarly obscurely uniquely

hopingly

I love I shall love

Translated by Mary Ann Caws