You Drive Me Crazy (7 page)

The poet John Milton describes a marriage gone sour as “a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption,” and poet Carolyn Creedon says that a bad relationship feels like a “lovely, broken experiment.” Either way, for the first time, you're really afraid that the oft-quoted “half of all marriages end in divorce” (and probably
more
than half of live-in relationships) statistic applies to you.

It is not necessarily true that every relationship reaches this wretched point, but if you find yourself in this dark place, we think that reading these poems can help you figure out where you are and what you really want—they can actually help you assess your unhappiness. Perhaps you will recognize yourself in the comic exasperation of Marie Howe's “Marriage” and not in the tragedy of Sylvia Plath, but in either case this recognition can lead you toward the knowledge that the two of you need help.

In William Carlos Williams's “The Ivy Crown,” the speaker says that in love, “no doubts are permitted”; still, he warns us, they will come anyway, and if we are not careful, they “may before our time overwhelm us.” We think that these poems will help us face our doubts straight on—perhaps
before
we are overwhelmed by them and love is irrevocably lost.

Both “The More You Ruv Someone,” from
Avenue Q
, and Marie Howe's “Marriage” are horribly funny—and they both suggest that the flip side of any grand passion may well be rage. As the
Avenue Q
puppet character Christmas Eve tells fellow puppet character Kate Monster, “The more you love someone/The more you wishing/him dead!/Sometime you look at/him and only see fat and lazy./And wanting baseball bat/for hitting him on his head!”

In Marie Howe's “Marriage,” we are invited to feel a certain sympathy for the “strong woman” driven to bash her husband over the head with a bayonet. But maybe, these poems suggest, rage and despair can be overcome. In “The More You Ruv Someone,” we see that passion is intact, and perhaps the speaker in “Marriage” is simply warning us that too many evenings given over to the Discovery Channel can spark temporary insanity.

But perfection isn't the answer, either, Dorothy Parker tells us in the ironically titled “Love Song.” In fact, a bit of “fat and lazy” might be preferable to a guy who is “strong and bold,” as “jubilant as a flag unfurled,” and who lives “where the sunbeams start.” The speaker is bored, bored, bored with all this sweetness and light. In fact, she wishes “somebody'd shoot him.” If his imperfections are making us miserable, Parker's sly little poem advises us that even if perfection
were
possible (and of course, it isn't), we would still have times when we wished we'd “never met him.”

Okay, so we have (we hope) drawn you into this section with poems that leaven our anger, frustration, and despair with a bit of humor (see Gavin Ew art's “Ending” and Louise Glück's “Telemachus ' Detachment”). In Sylvia Plath's “The Rival” and Elizabeth Ash Vélez's “Cardinal Points,” no one is laughing. They both describe relationships that are airless, “drugged,” and false. “The Rival” fairly hums with the unhappiness of its speaker. Her “spiteful” lover—her rival (do recall that Plath's husband was fellow poet Ted Hughes)—is “beautiful, but annihilating.” The home they share is a “mausoleum,” where dissatisfactions are “as expansive as carbon monoxide” (and do recall that Plath killed herself after her marriage to Hughes fell apart). About as grim a love poem as you'll ever find.

The speaker in Vélez's “Cardinal Points” yearns for her past, a time when even the notion of winter was glamorous to her, when she read books in “a fever.” Now she feels like a character in a bad play; even her beloved books have become props in the creaking plot of her empty marriage. We hope that you
don't
recognize your life in these poems, but if you do, then it's time to talk, to see a therapist, to try again, or even to leave. Most of us have already learned that not every romance is meant to have a “happily ever after.” But we also know that
some
relationships survive betrayal, separation, and outright war (Bill and Hillary appear to soldier on).

Katharyn Howd Machan and Emily Dickinson suggest that at least part of our misery can be caused by our stubborn and unexamined belief in the fairytale myth of
true love
, which leads to impossible expectations. So in “Hazel Tells LaVerne,” we get a wonderful and funny deconstruction of the frog-who-needs-a-kiss-to-be-a-prince story:

an he says

kiss me just kiss me

once on the nose

well i screams

ya little green pervert

an i hitsm with my mop

And we think, yes, if your relationship is based on that particular fairy-tale model—if you believe that you can turn a frog into a prince and you'll live happily ever after—well, you don't necessarily have to hit him with your mop, but you probably should either radically readjust your expectations or move on.

Understanding that your pain is caused by impossible expectations is, in a strange way, a healthy kind of misery. The trick is not to give up on the reality of imperfect, human love. The speaker in Kate Bingham's “Sex”
has
given up. But we say no, you've experienced the “sweet impossible blossom” of ecstatic love and can reject your mother's horrifying advice that sex is the “closest a man and a woman could get/to wanting the same thing at the same time,” and that “this was love.”

Louise Bogan's advice in “Knowledge” is better than the mom's in Bingham's poem, we think. Even if it
seems
you've learned that “treasure is brittle” and “passion warms little,” don't give up on love. Let yourself lie back and reflect on something more distant from your pain—how “the trees make a long shadow/And a light sound,” for example.

So read these poems and take measure of your misery. Having faced what William Carlos Williams calls the “cruel and selfish and totally obtuse” part of love, you can, at least, decide where to go from here. We do know it's possible to get past the misery. In Jane Hirshfield's “Broken-Off Twig Budding Out in the Path,”
something
plops in the water. The speaker says that it may be “nothing/that swims,/nothing that hops, or hopes.” Or it
may
be “a thing/like this stick—/its red buds swelling out/in spite of what it/ought to know,/in spite of where it ought to be.” This poem tells us that spring (even misplaced) will always survive the misery of winter, and that love, like a “quickened water sprout,” can survive a season of unhappiness.

Relationship

What a silence, when you are here. What

a hellish silence.

You sit and I sit.

You lose and I lose.

JÁNOS PILINSZKY (T
RANS
. P
ETER
J
AY
)

The Ivy Crown

The whole process is a lie,

unless,

crowned by excess,

it break forcefully,

one way or another,

from its confinement—

or find a deeper well.

Antony and Cleopatra

were right;

they have shown

the way. I love you

or I do not live

at all.

Daffodil time

is past. This is

summer, summer!

the heart says,

and not even the full of it.

No doubts

are permitted—

though they will come

and may

before our time

overwhelm us.

We are only mortal

but being mortal

can defy our fate.

We may

by an outside chance

even win! We do not

look to see

jonquils and violets

come again

but there are,

still,

the roses!

Romance has no part in it.

The business of love is

cruelty
which
,

by our wills,

we transform

to live together.

It has its seasons,

for and against,

whatever the heart

fumbles in the dark

to assert

toward the end of May.

Just as the nature of briars

is to tear flesh,

I have proceeded

through them.

Keep

the briars out,

they say.

You cannot live

and keep free of

briars.

Children pick flowers.

Let them.

Though having them

in hand

they have no further use for them

but leave them crumpled

at the curb's edge.

At our age the imagination

across the sorry facts

lifts us

to make roses

stand before thorns.

Sure

love is cruel

and selfish

and totally obtuse—

at least, blinded by the light,

young love is.

But we are older,

I to love

and you to be loved,

we have,

no matter how,

by our wills survived

to keep

the jeweled prize

always

at our finger tips.

We will it so

and so it is

past all accident.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

The More You Ruv Someone

from
Avenue Q

KATE MONSTER

Why can't people get along and

love each other, Christmas Eve?

CHRISTMAS EVE

You think getting along

same as loving?

Sometimes love right where you

hating most, Kate Monster.

KATE MONSTER

Huh?

CHRISTMAS EVE

THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE,

THE MORE YOU WANT TO KILL 'EM.

THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE

THE MORE HE MAKE YOU CRY

THOUGH YOU ARE TRY

FOR MAKING PEACE

WITH THEM AND LOVING,

THAT'S WHY YOU LOVE

SO STRONG YOU LIKE TO

MAKE HIM DIE!

THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE

THE MORE HE MAKE YOU CRAZY.

THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE

THE MORE YOU WISHING

HIM DEAD!

SOMETIME YOU LOOK AT

HIM AND ONLY SEE FAT AND LAZY.

AND WANTING BASEBALL BAT

FOR HITTING HIM ON HIS HEAD!

LOVE…

KATE MONSTER

LOVE…

CHRISTMAS EVE

AND HATE…

KATE MONSTER

AND HATE…

CHRISTMAS EVE

THEY LIKE TWO BROTHERS…

KATE MONSTER

BROTHERS…

CHRISTMAS EVE

WHO GO ON A DATE

KATE MONSTER

WHO…What?

CHRISTMAS EVE

WHERE ONE OF THEM GOES,

OTHER ONE FOLLOWS

YOU INVITING LOVE

HE ALSO BRINGING SORROWS.

KATE MONSTER

Ah, yes.

CHRISTMAS EVE

THE MORE YOU LOVE SOMEONE,

THE MORE YOU WANT TO KILL 'EM.

LOVING AND KILLING

FIT LIKE HAND IN GLOVE!

KATE MONSTER

Hand in glove.

SO IF THERE SOMEONE

YOU ARE WANTING

SO TO KILL 'EM,

YOU GO AND FIND HIM,

AND YOU GET HIM,

AND YOU NO KILL HIM,

CAUSE CHANCES GOOD

CHRISTMAS EVE

HE IS YOUR LOVE.

KATE MONSTER

(Simultaneously.)

HE IS MY LOVE.

ROBERT LOPEZ AND JEFF MARX

Marriage

My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the building shows,

the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel.

Last night, he told us about a man who came into the emergency room

with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and brain.

Did they get it out? We all asked.

They did. And the man was O.K. because the blade went exactly between

the two halves without severing them.

And who had shoved this bayonet into the man's head? His wife.

A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else agreed.

MARIE HOWE

Love Song

My own dear love, he is strong and bold

And he cares not what comes after.

His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,

And his eyes are lit with laughter.

He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—

Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.

My own dear love, he is all my world—

And I wish I'd never met him.

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,

And a wild young wood-thing bore him!

The ways are fair to his roaming feet,

And the skies are sunlit for him.

As sharply sweet to my heart he seems

As the fragrance of acacia.

My own dear love, he is all my dreams—

And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,

And he makes no friends of sorrows.

He'll tread his galloping rigadoon

In the pathway of the morrows.

He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,

Nor could storm or wind uproot him.

My own dear love, he is all my heart—

And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

DOROTHY PARKER

Ending

The love we thought would never stop

now cools like a congealing chop.

The kisses that were hot as curry

are bird-pecks taken in a hurry.

The hands that held electric charges

now lie inert as four moored barges.

The feet that ran to meet a date

are running slow and running late.

The eyes that shone and seldom shut

are victims of a power cut.

The parts that then transmitted joy

are now reserved and cold and coy.

Romance, expected once to stay,

has left a note saying
GONE AWAY
.

GAVIN EWART

Telemachus' Detachment

When I was a child looking

at my parents' lives, you know

what I thought? I thought

heartbreaking. Now I think

heartbreaking, but also

insane. Also

very funny.

LOUISE GLÜCK

The Rival

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.