This episode was originally released on February 28, 2024.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I am far from my adolescent days of singing along to R&B songs and wishing to be in love. Investigating my past with objective distance and time, both being required of serious self-examination, I now conclude I entangled myself in relationships in which my emotions exceeded my capacity to truly love — in the most exalted eminence of that word.

What I mean by this is that I was, to state it simply, in love with being in love, which partially accounts to my being a poet. Though pursued with great seriousness, spontaneous dates, gourmet meals, small gifts, quickly dashed-off poems, music playlists, were almost never about my partner but more about my ability to feel. By the way, I did not learn this in therapy. I wish I had. What a hard lesson to arrive at, in my fourth decade on earth.

If you’ll permit a comparison: I am a fan of brunch: golden pastries, French press coffee, parsley gremolata and mushroom omelets, fluted glasses of mimosas. But I have learned that I am an even bigger fan of meeting up with friends on weekends. The eggs never match the excellence of the company who ultimately satiate my appetite. Brunch is merely the means by which I experience what I enjoy most — my friends and their witty conversations and banter.

In relationships, I was driven by curiosity and desire. Those early days of long nights on the phone, in retrospect, seem puerile. A relationship begins when matters of biography are long past and a couple works to decipher the desperate behaviors and terrors that underlie our interactions. That’s what intimacy looks like.

In hindsight, I often wonder about the resolve, commitment, and patience it takes to advance a relationship to the comfortable grounds of absolute and unknown love. Who has it and who does not?

Today’s poem reminds me of the daunting and ongoing and heartrending work of preparing ourselves to love and to dare to receive it, if we can. This is a poem by Sophie Cabot Black.

Love Poem
by Sophie Cabot Black

Which cannot be written tries anyway—
From one room to another, each time startled
And does not want to hear of the already

Passed through, the country of before.
Poem that at each door believes itself
In the room closest to the end

Where finally everything will be gone over,
Dismantled, held up, carefully laid back down
While talked into the beauty which can turn

In a minute. To hear of every other
Poem written is to begin
Revision and what cannot be left enough

Alone and so the lovers look at each other
Until none else can come near. Poem
Which never wanted anything but this

Tries anyway, so brave, unable to know where
She heads; unwrapping until only a gift
Which cannot be given as it cannot be let go.

“Love Poem” by Sophie Cabot Black from THE EXCHANGE © 2013 Sophie Cabot Black. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press