Adina Kopinsky | Love Poem with Polenta | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

February 2020

Adina Kopinsky

Love Poem with Polenta

— after Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you for your hands that rest on mine like sand I dug my body deep inside, nor for your shoulders, though they spread like ribbons of yolk across the sky. I don’t know why I love you nor what it means to love. You bite in me like salt I stir into simmering milk — cornmeal runs in thin streams through my fingers, sifts of marigold slipping into white. Perhaps love is just habituation or need or want or symbiosis or all these in equal measure with butter and sage whisked ceaselessly — this evening, too tired to talk we simply sit, passing the polenta hand to hand, until only a few wet yellow crumbs cling to the bottom of the bowl.

I had been thinking for a while about why I avoid love poems. Something about the genre felt cliche to me, no matter how well written, even the idea of writing my own made me feel fearful and vulnerable. And because I was afraid of love poems, I knew this meant I should figure out how to write one that could capture what I really wanted to see: my own experience of love in its honest, prosaic form, a poem that could express the everyday-ness of a long-term relationship. During this time, I came across Neruda's Sonnet 17 and had that feeling of perfection — that shiver up the spine that demands my attention — I knew I had finally found something that captured what I felt was incomplete everywhere else: the aspect of not knowing what love is, yet living it in any case. The understanding that love is ultimately an enigma. Within minutes, I had a first draft written of "Love Poem with Polenta."

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