"You Don't Know What Love Is"

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler

That's what the first line says
of the song I've been playing all summer
at the keyboard—trying to get my hands
around its dark, melancholy chords,
its story line of a melody that twists
up like snakes from melodic minor scales
that I've also been trying to learn, though
I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales.

Come to think of it, neither am I much
when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean.
Not that I haven't had my chances.
Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband,
half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby
than a grown man, the poet laureate
of the self-induced coma when it came to
doing anything for anybody but me.
"Now and then he took his thumb
out of his mouth to write an ode to
or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day."

That's what I imagined my ex-wife said
to our therapist near the end. She did say:
"It's all about Bill." She was right.
And suddenly it frightens me, remembering
how, at our wedding, our poet friends
read poems of (mostly) utter depression
to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love
had double-crossed our union, if strange
snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden
had hissed at us, and now I worry,
on your wedding day, if I'm not
doing the same damned thing . . . .

I haven't come to spring up and put my curse
on your bliss. Here's what I want to say:
You're young. You don’t know what love is.
And as the next line of the song goes, you won't
—"Until you know the meaning of the blues."
Darlings, the blues will come (though not
often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords
against your paradise. A little of that
you unwittingly got today, when it rained
and you couldn't be married outside under
the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard.
But paradise doesn't have to be structured
so that we can never reenter it. After
you've kicked each other out of it
once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically,
of course), teach yourself how to say
a few kind words to each other.
Don't stand there angry, stony.
Each of you let the other know
what you are feeling and thinking

and then it may be possible
to return to each other smiling,
hand in hand. For arm in arm,
you are your best Eden. Remember
the advice the old poet sang to you
on the afternoon of August 4, 2001,
the day you got married.
May you enjoy a good laugh
thinking of him and his silver thumb
now that you've turned the key
into your new life in the beautiful
Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

-- Bill Zavatsky (1943- ) poet, translator, musician, teacher, and editor, from Where X Marks the Spot