We are overdue for another Thursday Love Poem, and as I’ve said before, “a Thursday Love Poem isn’t your grandmother’s love poem, baby.” It’s an unconventional love poem at least, and sometimes it’s a downright anti-love poem, as in the flagship poem of this feature, Edna Saint Vincent Millay’s “Thursday.”  If you aren’t familiar with it I encourage you to follow the link, but for now, here is the little controversial gem in its entirety:

           THURSDAY

AND if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday–
So much is true.

And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,–yes–but what
Is that to me?

But of course I don’t want to be all “Down with Love” here, so truly emotional and heartfelt pieces about real love are not out of the question. It’s just in order to qualify as a Thursday Love Poem “it will have to look at that tenderness squinting sideways, maybe standing on its head, in order to give us a unique view, one other than what the masses have come to expect of a love poem.”

I recently finished reading the lovely little book For All of Us, One Today, by Richard Blanco. It’s all about his experience of being asked to read for the president’s inauguration last January. It also chronicles a bit of his life story as a gay man and a child of Cuban exiles, who had to discover how he fit into the story of America for himself. It’s a splendid little read that I plan to write more about here soon. I highly recommend it.

You may not realize that an inaugural poet has six weeks to compose three poems to be considered by the inaugural committee. They vote on the appropriate piece and the poet has a short period of time to edit it before inauguration day. Lots of pressure.

My son Micah and I, and our whole Poetry Under the Paintings gang had the privilege of hearing him read in person at Penn State University back in October, and Blanco was a class act, kind and engaging, humorous and brilliant. But aside from the poetry, what impressed me most, even more than his wonderful talent of story-telling, was how, though we were last in line for book signings, and it must have been a terribly long day for him, he took the time to ask my son about his writing, even about the origin of his name. It was a great experience all around.

One of the poems he read that night was this week’s Thursday Love Poem. And when I came home I had to sit down with his book Looking for the Gulf Motel and read it to my partner Brian. As Blanco said, in each relationship there seems to be that one who doesn’t check his phone, rarely returns calls or texts, and then there is the other who is prone to worry and exaggeration. Yup, that last one is me, and it’s also Richard Blanco, as you’ll see in his fantastically perfect poem “Killing Mark.”

Killing Mark

His plane went down over Los Angeles
last week (again), or was it Long Island?
Boxer shorts, hair gel, his toothbrush
washed up on the shore at New Haven,
but his body never recovered, I feared.

Monday, he cut off his leg chain sawing—
bled to death slowly while I was shopping
for a new lamp, never heard my messages
on his cell phone: Where are you? Call me!
I told him to be careful. He never listens.

The entire poem is printed in his book Looking for the Gulf Motel, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012