These Poems, She Said

 These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man 

who would leave his wife and child because 

they made noise in his study. These are the poems 

of a man who would murder his mother to claim 

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man 

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not 

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women, 

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s 

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These 

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant  

as elm leaves, which if they love love only 

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, 

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. 

These poems, she said....

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said” from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Bringhurst. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178483