Romantics

Given that yesterday was love day, i wanted to share this poem, which I absolutely adore. It is by Lisel Mueller, and is about the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. I love it because it speaks to the tendency that society has to hold every relationship up to the magnifying lens of spoken and unspoken attitudes about what love is, and what it should be; how it should be expressed, and between whom. I have found in my own life that love comes rarely, that it often rises out of the most unlikely places, and that no one, except possibly the two people experiencing it, can truly understand it completely.

Romantics

 by Lisel Mueller

The modern biographers worry

"how far it went," their tender friendship.

They wonder just what it means

when he writes he thinks of her constantly,

his guardian angel, beloved friend.

The modern biographers ask

the rude, irrelevant question

of our age, as if the event

of two bodies meshing together

establishes the degree of love,

forgetting how softly Eros walked

in the nineteenth century, how a hand

held overlong or a gaze anchored

in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,

and nuances of address not known

in our egalitarian language

could make the redolent air

tremble and shimmer with the heat

of possibility. Each time I hear

the Intermezzi, sad

and lavish in their tenderness,

I imagine the two of them

sitting in a garden

among late-blooming roses

and dark cascades of leaves,

letting the landscape speak for them,

leaving us nothing to overhear.