Aimless Love, Summer Love *
Aimless Love, Summer Love
by kimberly e. ruth
*a response to Billy Collin’s Aimless Love
The best kind of love, he wrote
was that without recompose, without
gifts, or unkind words,
without silence
on the telephone:
a mouse carcass, a wren,
a chestnut.
I continue reading under a confused fan,
a dim light. He breathes, unaware.
Things like that, he argues
they can’t slam doors or pack their lives into boxes
and leave
there is no waiting
no broken arrows
Aimless love, he called it,
desirable, he makes it sound,
yet,
I look at him and his stomach,
pulsing
slowly
He is not a chestnut, I think,
yet,
he spoke:
I’m cold
I know, I replied.
I guess this poem marks the end of ‘Erotica Week’ and the beginning of ‘Endless Love Week’…good to follow one with the other though i half suspected it might have something to do with cigarettes. lol. Enjoyed the themes immensely and a lot of awesome poems this week.
Aimless Love, Summer Love: enjoyed the read, Kimmy. Sorta a forgotten traditional ‘interpretive’ technique making a poem on another poem that i enjoy doing myself. I’ve heard mixed reviews on Billy Collins as a poet…some very praiseworthy and some where he’s a bit elitist. But i reckon poetry would be uninteresting if the writer was just as much so. I mean, taking up yoga to better understand the intracacies of the ‘Kama Sutra’, and then the resultant literary piece crafted afterword–that’s cooler than electric shizil.
i admired the way the author of the piece you’re reading (Collins), somehow comes to life and replies back in your poem–that’s using imagination!