Wolves Change Rivers
Sometimes I read a line from a dead poet and think, wow, we must’ve lived our lives in a particularly desperate way to arrive at the same echoed line. Sometimes I scoff, how unoriginal we are in loneliness and in love. Will we ever change? If I could do anything at this very moment it would be to walk all 720 miles to see your face exactly as it is, through the window when you’re unaware of my presence. Would the corners of your mouth mimic the smile of a dead actor? A river? A vein? I’ll never know like you’ll never know what’s really going on in Turkey. I want to hold your heart like a plum pit I extracted from the windpipe of a fat man—all spit covered, unstrained, and round like the earth. I want to hold you like a brass trumpet, like a tree branch, like a dead bird I am offering to the sun and the rain, like I am important and you are beautiful. Those seem like original gestures, but I know they’re not. I can’t live by poetry alone. I can’t live by my own two hands. Can’t live alone on the fruit the pit bears. It seems silly, but then it does not. I used to be something else—a sad, lost beetle, and then I was not. How do you explain that? Love. Wolves change rivers.
| Rae Hoffman |
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levelheaded: Wolves Change Rivers
We’re attracted to the colloquial, daydreaming quality of this shameless love poem. At its most basic, the poem is about finding the words to describe love. It’s about writing a poem. It’s about knowing you’ll fail, but trying anyway. It makes us wonder what impulse compels us to validate the love in our life by declaring it unique. And it makes us wonder why we keep writing love poems.
This poem is best characterized by a couple of conflicting impulses. One impulse is to point out the apparent uniqueness of the love between these two people. To this end, the poem gives us purposeful absurdities like, “I want to hold your heart like a plum pit I extracted from the windpipe of a fat man” or “I want to hold you […] like a dead bird I am offering to the sun and the rain.” Another impulse puts forth the idea that what’s between these lovers is not unique at all, but that it’s part of a long, unavoidable tradition of human love. To this end, we’re given the speaker’s “same echoed line” and her dismissal of “original gestures.”
The poem flip-flops between these impulses. Early on, the speaker “scoffs” when comparing her own line with that of a “dead poet.” Instead, she scans for something distinctive to testify to her affection for her unnamed lover. She comes up with a 720-mile walk “to see your face exactly as it is.” But she knows this is not an “original gesture.” And when she says, “I’ll never know like you’ll never know what’s really going on in Turkey,” she admits to limitations of her and her lover’s perspective She implies it’s impossible to apply language to anything with full accuracy. After all, how often is a smile really like “a river” or “a vein?” By the final quarter of the poem, the speaker unambiguously declares poetry’s inadequacy. The poem’s penultimate sentence announces the poem’s subject again. The speaker recognizes there is a word for what she means – love – but that word is not quite right all by itself.
So why do we keep writing love poems? What makes us think we’ll be the ones to finally get it right? In the last 700 years or so, everything worth saying about love – in English, at least – has already been put down, right? (See: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Browning, Cummings, Kizer, etc.) The poem answers with its final line: “Wolves change rivers.” It’s a bizarre final sentence. It’s private and sits outside any context the rest of the poem creates. But somehow, the speaker’s last attempt to put everything into words works perfectly, as if the line itself knows it’s temporary and its job is impossible.
– The Editors
