I pray you, mar no more trees by writing love-songs in their barks
The couple, they stew deer into their sauce.
That said, loss of love is our first concern.
She’s starting to shred an arsenal onto the bar.
Rolled between thumb & forefinger & flicked.
But everything looks clean.
You think your paper shrapnel can compete with Cupid’s arrow?
They are pedestrians, they don’t own cars.
And yet, you can detect the strain of dependence.
Which is he that killed the deer?
A material fool.
But this is an electronic statement, a sustainable love-song.
The worst fault you have is to be in love.
Wait,
you’re missing my point. The venison was the girl in a past life.
Wait, she is a tree. We’re talking about Daphne.
She needs
a medicine. You’re missing my point, this love-song is rotting my roots.
Wait, I am the girl and the sauce is savory.
Note: The title and collaged lines are taken from the melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
| Megan Ronan |
|
levelheaded: I pray you, mar no more trees by writing love-songs in their barks
Out of context, the marginally edited line of Shakespeare used as this poem’s title could be read broadly as a plea to save the rainforest. It isn’t (or isn’t exclusively), but, ay, there’s the rub in this kind of assemblage: we are asked to examine lines apart from their source and understand them as singular bits of speech, yet we are expected to recognize something of the original source as well. Appropriation equalizes the various meanings of a line, so what was a subtext becomes part of a main text. This poem’s title, for instance, is a passing insult in As You Like It. Here though, separate from its dialogue, it seems a more pained, personal “prayer” to stop writing “love-songs.” When Jaques says, “The worst fault you have is to be in love,” it is first a dig at Orlando’s schmaltzy poetry. In Megan Ronan’s poem though, seriousness takes precedence, as if something more than Orlando’s boorishness were at stake.
And maybe something more is always at stake, since “loss of love is our first concern.” The speaker begins in the third-person with “the couple” and ends in the first-person with an “I.” The poem moves from a mundane narrative about the creation of spitballs into a self-conscious, back-tracking sort of lyric. It ends with a mention of Daphne’s mythical transformation into a tree then segues into the speaker’s own transformation into “the girl” who was once a tree or was once a deer. If “loss of love is our first concern,” our second concern might be that this speaker has lost her mind, or at least a hunk of her identity. In this way, Ronan’s poem can be read as an acknowledgment of Shakespeare as a progenitor of a modern conception of love, an emotion that, according to both Shakespeare and Ronan, wreaks havoc on our internal lives, releasing neuroses in legion.
Importantly though, “I pray you” is also about the breakdown of human connections. In some ways this makes the poem a comment on changes to our conception of love since Shakespeare. A motif of environmental destruction haunts the progressive strangeness of the speaker. “[T]he strain of dependence,” the rotting roots, the “sustainable love-song,” and the poem’s title all actually support our original (and reductive) reading of the poem as a “plea to save the rainforest,” but perhaps that isn’t so far off. Maybe it’s not just the large literal environment that needs protecting, but also the environment we create by carefully collecting people and positioning them precariously at the edges of our lives.
-The Editors
