THE LATE, LAST WISDOM OF THE AFTERNOON

Archibald MacLeish

1892 - 1982

Yesterday, my friend Friko, author of the wonderful blog, Friko's World, published a rather poignant story about the challenges facing an elderly couple who live in her village.  As I read the piece, I was taken back to a special evening in the early seventies when I spent an evening in the Library of Congress listening to Archibald MacLeish read some of his poetry.  At the close of the evening, MacLeish read a deeply touching poem in which an elderly couple explore the meaning of their relationship as their individual lives face the ravages of time.  The last line of the poem, spoken by MacLeish with heartfelt and autobiographical certainty, has been etched in my memory for more than forty years.  Perhaps it will be meaningful for others as well.  

THE OLD GRAY COUPLE
by Archibald MacLeish

They have only to look at each other to laugh —
no one knows why, not even they:
something back in the lives they've lived,
something they both remember but no words can say.

They go off at the evening's end to talk
but they don't, or to sleep but they lie awake —
hardly a word, just a touch, just near,
just listening but not to hear.

Everything they know they know together —
everything, that is, but one:
their lives they've learned like secrets from each other;
their deaths they think of in the nights alone.

She:  Love, says the poet, has no reasons.
He:  Not even after fifty years?
She:  Particularly after fifty years.
He:  What was it, then, that lured us, that still teases?
She:  You used to say my plaited hair!
He:  And then you'd laugh.
She:  Because it wasn't plaited.

Love had no reasons so you made one up to laugh at.  Look! The old gray couple!

He:  No, to prove the adage true:
Love has no reasons but old lovers do.
She:  And they can't tell.
He:  I can and so can you.
Fifty years ago we drew each other, magnetized needle toward the longing north.
It was your naked presence that so moved me.  It was your absolute presence that
was love.
She:  Ah, was!
He:  And now, years older, we begin to see absence not presence: what the world
would be without your footstep in the world — the garden empty of the radiance
where you are.
She:  And that's your reason? — that old lovers see their love because they know
now what its loss will be?
He:  Because, like Cleopatra in the play, they know there's nothing left once
love's away . . .
She:  Nothing remarkable beneath the visiting moon . . . 
He:  Ours is the late, last wisdom of the afternoon.  We know that love, like 
light, grows dearer toward the dark.

TO LOVE DIFFERENTLY

A Pair of Lovers, by Van Gogh

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Eric Fromm

This posting has its genesis in a fine poem—To Have Without Holding—by poet and novelist Marge Piercy.  Since reading the poem a few days ago, I have continued to be haunted by the first line: "Learning to love differently is hard."

From my perspective, this poem touches upon something profound, specifically, the way that life experiences shape our evolving approaches to love.  One of the charming conceits of youth is the romantic ideal that each of us will eventually meet someone and "fall" effortlessly into a state of perennial bliss—a sort of nirvana in which the relationship is protected from the vicissitudes of life.  Romantic ideals, however, always have a way of colliding with reality, and when that occurs, we usually have only two choices.  We can either become disappointed and cynical, or we can begin to reevaluate and reshape our romantic ideals.  We can, as Piercy suggests in the first line of her poem, learn to "love differently."  We can even learn to "love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms . . ."  And if we do, if we are willing to give up the clutch-hold on our youthful romantic ideals, we may come to find the very thing we have been looking for all along, a deep love that is rich and enduring, one that is more than adequate to withstand the conflicts, disappointments, and frustrations that await every journey. 

Enough of what I think.  What do you think?  Perhaps you will find something in Piercy's poem that resonates with your own life.

TO HAVE WITHOUT HOLDING

by Marge Piercy

                                      Learning to love differently is hard, 

                                      love with the hands wide open, love

                                      with the doors banging on their hinges,

                                      the cupboard unlocked, the wind

                                      roaring and whimpering in the rooms

                                      rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

                                      that thwack like rubber bands

                                      in an open palm.

                                      It hurts to love wide open

                                      stretching the muscles that feel

                                      as if they are made of wet plaster,

                                      then of blunt knives, then

                                      of sharp knives.

                                      It hurts to thwart the reflexes

                                      of grab, of clutch; to love and let

                                      go again and again.  It pesters to remember

                                      the lover who is not in the bed,

                                      to hold back what is owed to the work

                                      that gutters like a candle in a cave

                                      without air, to love consciously,

                                      conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

                                      I can't do it, you say it's killing

                                      me, but you thrive, you glow

                                      on the street like a neon raspberry,

                                      you float and sail, a helium balloon

                                      bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing

                                      on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

                                      as we make and unmake in passionate

                                      diastole and systole the rhythm

                                      of our unbound bonding, to have

                                      and not to hold, to love
                                      with minimized malice, hunger

                                      and anger moment by moment balanced.

Lest there be any doubt, I do not stand pure in this arena.  Quixotically, I have broken many lances in the windmills of youthful romantic ideals.  With every passing year, however, I have tried to reshape those ideals to account for the unpredictability of human life—my life and the lives of others—and while much work remains to be done, I feel, perhaps for the first time in many decades, that I am learning "to love and let go again and again."  I am learning to love differently.