The preacher on the train says
he loves God's creatures so much
he loves all people so much
he loves me so much
he'd hate to see me burn in hell.
I want to love that way.
I want my love to be a threat.
I want to say, I love you so much
love you so hard and deep,
I'd hate to see you cross me.
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This is great. I love it especially because I got two very different layers on my first and second reading. The fist time through, I thought it was very clever and humorous in a Shel Silverstein kind of way, and the second time, I could not get the idea of household abuse out of my head. It seems like something like that must be a fragment of what goes on...
ReplyDeletei love this! in only two short stanzas, you've introduced a full person.
ReplyDeletethis threatening love reminds me of donne--"batter my heart...something something." BUT the speaker is not asking to be loved that way, but to love that way. (I WANT TO BATTER YOUR HEART.) i love this twist of seeing the threat/violence in god's love (set up by the preacher's words) and seeing it as a condition that we can follow, rather than be the recipient.
there's a nice tension between what the speaker says she wants to be and what she is. the parallel sentences are really telling. the "i want" statements are really powerful and the sentence structure sets up this feeling that the speaker isn't capable of threatening love--but she has experienced it herself. the speaker says she wants to love this way but there's a wistful tone, like she knows that she can't.
i think i read this a bit differently, but introducing Christianity via street preaching makes me give a whole lot of significance to that last line. And then, then when cross becomes CROSS, the idea of threat takes on an entirely different meaning because the threat is against the person Loving, not the object of the love. The poem undermines the preacher not because the preacher is foolhardy and stubborn and uncaring and all the things Christians don't want to be, but because he hasn't understood the cost of the things he's talking about, and he hasn't grasped the price of love.
ReplyDeleteand then, the thought of wanting to love so much that you wouldn't want the other to Cross you is a very different animal.
I agree with Tim--first time I read it I thought you had meant to write "crucify" and that's the first image I thought about.
ReplyDeleteand it may have been unintentional but I think that makes the poem unbelievably and delightfully complex because of the ambivalent meaning of that last stanza, if it's read as a sort of crucifying moment. Either you're saying that you wish it was that simple, that you don't believe that it's true and that you wish the preacher were right--OR--you want to a kind of savior to your lover--OR you want your lover to suffer the same kind of mad preacher-ness or something...see--it's complicated and brings in a kind of longing for religion rather than absolute rejection of it, which, i think, makes it a wonderfully challenging poem.
dinah - this is great.
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