In Their Own Words
D.S. Waldman on “A Love Poem”
A Love Poem
As if there were a minor jealousy
Birds settling on a wire. Forgive me, the
Same as before the virus. I couldn't
I was at the airport, watching someone's
Sort of like that. If it's a palimpsest
To see rain clouds taxi through the blinds
We mean when we say of the children, they
Forced open the flower, or needed to
He said. Sometimes the language we borrow
The bell rings all the time but the bell is
Crows fighting in the trees. And suddenly
This is the one I was talking about
If we had more time—it's always like that
Years later, to keep the frames on the wall
Reprinted from Atria (Liveright, 2026) with the permission of the poet. All rights reserved.
On “A Love Poem”
“A Love Poem” appears in my collection ATRIA, as part of a quasi crown of sonnets titled “Low Theory.” Typically, a crown consists of fifteen consecutive sonnets linked by their first and last lines. The last line of sonnet one becomes the first line of sonnet two; the last line of sonnet two becomes the first line of sonnet three. The series continues this way until the final line of the entire series, which is a repetition of the first line of the first sonnet.
In composing “Low Theory,” I used this structure as a container for a sort of meditation, through poetry, on the ideas and experiences presented in an essay that precedes it in the book:
Twenty years ago, I was in an accident that resulted in the loss of function and feeling in my right hand. I’d been playing ice hockey, and I fell to the ice. A friend’s skate found, somehow, the underside of my wrist, severing the median nerve and all five tendons. There was a lot of blood. There was surgery. Years of physical therapy. I’d been, at the time, right-handed.
To begin parsing how my accident, and ensuing disability, have impacted my life, and in particular how, as a writer, my creative practice, my research interests, and my aesthetics have been informed by my disability, I turned to the Cubist paintings of Georges Braque, the elliptical poetry of John Ashbery and Ben Lerner, and to Jack Halberstam’s critical work around non-binary knowledge practices. I was drawn to fragmentation. Nonlinear experience. Aesthetic plurality. Cubist composition, for instance, is interested in seeing a single object—a violin, a face, a bowl of fruit—from many different vantages at once. This is what gives these works a sense of shardedness. A nose here, in profile. Over there, a sliver of an ear seen head-on with its pearl earring, dangling. Somewhere, an upturned glass of wine.
The crown—and “A Love Poem”—draw procedural inspiration from Braque as well as Lerner’s nonlinear book-length sequence “Mean Free Path.” By this I mean there is no single way through these sonnets; I personally experience them much the way I experience Braque’s paintings, encountering with each read associations and potential meanings I had previously skipped over or forgotten, or sometimes had not even intended. For those who choose to read it, I wish you many experiences. I hope your gaze lands where it lands, that for you the rain never reaches ground.
