Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, July 22, 2007

Too many movies, poems, songs, TV shows deal in the familiar, offering the comfort of the predictable. Sometimes, an artist defies that kind of expectation, to express a feeling:

TO YOU

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut

That will solve a murder case unsolved for years

Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window

Through which he saw her head, connecting with

Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red

Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;

For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not

Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a

Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails

In the wind, when you're near, a wind that blows from

The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;

I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields

Always, to be near you, even in my heart

When I'm awake, which swims, and also I believe that you

Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to

The place where I again think of you, a new

Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow

Of a ship which sails

From Hartford to Miami, and I love you

Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun

Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) puts ships in landlocked Hartford and a walnut detective in the opening simile of this early poem (from his new Selected Poems, well edited by Ron Padgett), not just to mock literary solemnity -- that is incidental -- but to offer "You" the pleasure of something genuine, as well as genuinely amusing.

That is a tradition in love poetry. William Shakespeare, like his model Philip Sidney (and Sidney's model Francesco Petrarca), also lets his impatience with standard language suggest a high standard for both courtship and poetry:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Crazier than shirttails in the wind, bored by "false compare," both poets also like the refreshing simplicity of words such as "shiny" for the sea and "go" for how a goddess moves.

(Kenneth Koch's poem "To You" can be found in "Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems," edited by Ron Padgett. Library of America. Copyright 1998 by Kenneth Koch and copyright 2005 by the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate.)