“A Bed for Your Voice to Sleep In”

Last month, our prompt was to take the first line of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”—“Come live with me and be my love”—and run with it. The assignment provoked inventive poems: unusual titles and opening lines that played beautifully with Marlowe’s. NLP veteran Josie Cannella, who titled her work “I Live with Thee,” inverted Marlowe’s opening line:

I live with thee; come be my love
again, as on that trip we drove
for our first date. Three days we spent
inseparable! Each moment meant

we were both sent by fate, or by
a previous life. We used to ply
each other with our songs and tales.
Now our love quails. It stales. It fails.

Let’s win love back from Time’s chariot.
We’re not too old to turn Iscariot
on obligations we can toss
in favor of time in the sauce

of sex. We’ll start by sending texts
while we’re at work, with kisses. Next
we’ll have a date. We’ll dine. We’ll dance,
drink wine … In bed by nine. Romance!

I admired Josie’s rhymes—mostly simple and exact, but with the added brilliant touch of “chariot” (as in Andrew Marvell’s “Time’s winged chariot”), which rhymes with “Iscariot.” The rhyme implies that time is a traitor whose lips promise the kiss of death. Notable too are the reiterated rhymes that conclude stanza two—“quails,” “stales,” “fails” following “tales”—and the alliterative phrase “the sauce / of sex,” where the enjambment underscores the surprise in the phrase’s conclusion.

“Next Line, Please” has helped create a community of appreciative critics who can articulate well what they value most in their peers’ writings. Paul Michelsen demonstrates this in his insightful take on Josie’s poem:

“Especially love the title, the first line(s), and ‘turn Iscariot’! Really captures the essence of ‘post-honeymoon blues’ and the longing to rekindle things. There’s so much tricky truth in the line ‘Let’s win love back from Time’s chariot.’ Time, the thing that supposedly heals all wounds, is also responsible for wounding all heels, as they say. These things can both be (potentially) true, I suppose, though to varying degrees, depending on what we ourselves bring to the table, of course, but also on what our tablemates bring, and then our reactions to each other, and to our respective presence/presents, ad infinitum; the alchemy created by our sauces, if you will.”

(To which Josie replied aptly and happily with thanks for the “saucy” comment.)

Palevanilla submitted a poem that begins with a truncated version of Marlowe’s opening line. “Cleave” is a splendid title. The word is, as Palevanilla points out, a “contranym,” a term that in this case means both to split (as with a cleaver) and to stick or adhere:

Come live with me and be.
My love, you have become
a stranger to me,
some idealogue from

hell—indoctrinated
by groupthink ignorance,
a mouthpiece for hatred,
thoughtless in your grievance.

Remember who you were?
Tolerant. Forgiving.
Accepting of others.
Have you forgotten living

with the fear of violence
for being who we are?
I fear you now, relentless,
taunting others for their stars.

The poem’s ambivalence is striking. The lover has become a “stranger” who has been “indoctrinated / by groupthink ignorance.”  The entire second stanza is a pertinent response to much of the mindless banter, insensitive if not insulting, that one comes across in social media—and even in conversations among friends or soon-to-be ex-friends. In a sense, the poem makes as much a political statement as a personal one. Josie Cannella expressed her appreciation for how the poet has “broken up the opening line.” The title, she adds, “is a word I played with at length in a poem I called ‘Cloven Clay Feet.’” Palevanilla complimented Josie on that title, writing that “the sound and image work perfectly with ‘cleave.’”

For imagery as striking as her poem’s title, it would be hard to do better than Ana P.’s “foraging in Circle”:

When you come live with me
and be my love again, remind me of my shape
before I started turning to a small ocean,
a bed for your voice

to sleep in. I want to leave
your waters, cling to the moonlight
at the sky’s small ribs
and trail across salted tree rings

and mountain ash. Except
you would peel me back ashore
through clenched eyes.
My insides, little more than willow

twigs, thrown clean in a pot. Elsewhere
I pick myself again from ticking glass,
tear through the same slices of moon
caught in my throat.

When we encounter “my shape,” we may expect a picture of a woman’s body, but the shape swiftly shifts into a “small ocean”—an oxymoron I wish I had thought of. This body of water then metamorphoses into “a bed for your voice / to sleep in.” That’s marvelous, and only the start of a series of images that include a celestial personification (“the sky’s small ribs”). The writer likens her insides to “willow / twigs,” and the moon, in slices, is caught in the speaker’s throat.

Noteworthy efforts from Rachael Watson (“Forever lives on a country hill”), Emily (“Crepuscular”), Michael C. Rush (Come Live My Love”), and others deserve mention.  If I seem unequal to what would usually be a pleasurable task, it is because two weeks ago, my dog chased a cat, and as I quickened my pace to follow, I fell hard, face first, on a bump in the road. The stitches have been removed, but doctor’s appointments still dominate my schedule, and my time online is limited.

I have thought of a new prompt all the same. Like most writers, I enjoy receiving unsolicited fan mail. But I sometimes get suspicious about the letter writer’s sincerity—when, for instance, a few paragraphs of praise are followed by indication that the writer has taken the liberty of attaching a manuscript he or she would like me to recommend for publication. How to respond, if at all?

So, I ask you to consider writing either an insincere fan letter or a clever rejection of an unwanted submission or invitation. This can be done either in verse (12 lines or fewer) or in a prose paragraph. An unoriginal example that comes to mind:

Your work
will be read
long after
Keats and Shelley
are forgotten

but not
until then.

Deadline: two weeks from the day this is posted. In poetry, deadlines are flexible, and “late beats never” is my byword on the subject.