Joyce Meyers's Shapes of Love

In the opening poem of Joyce Meyers’s chapbook, Shapes of Love, aptly titled “Love, like water,” the form love takes is mutable, contradictory, and mysterious: “Love is the body,/yet something//other, something/to long for, as the body//yearns to return/to the sea.” Heraclitus is famous for the phrase, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” In this book, Meyers makes the same point about the fluid set of emotions we collectively label “love”: from sexual attraction to mature love between long-time partners, between parents and children (from both sides and including both sexes), between human and animal, between friends, and even, in “Orphanage” and “Reading Poetry at the Fusion Café,” between strangers.

The sea is a strong presence in many of these poems, as are themes of music, fishing, food and cooking, gardening and the budding and blooming of flowers. Like the choreographer who works the finite types of movement possible for the human body into complex patterns, or the cook who can make several dishes from the same basic ingredients, Meyers returns to these fundamental themes and images, combining them in different ways so that each poem bears a relation to its mates and yet stands unique on its own.

It is a tempting parlor game to group poems in Shapes of Love into pairs (and even threes) precisely because the possibilities are so varied. In some cases the pairings may be obvious: “Orphanage, “ say, with “Lost Children” that precedes it, appearing on the opposite page. Here’s where it gets interesting, though, because the poem “Lost Children” is about the “double chain,/however twisted” binding a child raised by a biological parent. The pairing of these poems on opposite pages makes the strong suggestion that children raised by natural parents can be “lost,” as surely as those in an orphanage. Meanwhile, in “Orphanage,” the metaphysical bond that happens between the Tibetan orphan, “the only one/who has a mother, “ and the western visitor seems something akin to the wisdom the parent imparts at the end of “Lost children”: “when you find your self/you will find me.” So maybe both can be “found,” as well.

The poem “Roasted Pepper,” appears later on in the book and makes an intriguing pair with “Love, like water.” Here, the metaphor, though not explicit in the title, is clear in the opening description: “Shaped like a battered/heart, geranium red,/a child’s valentine.” The poem avoids sentimentality by swerving into a darker truth: “Hollow inside/with bitter seeds/it doesn’t invite/biting into.” “Hidden sweetness” here comes from “charring skin black/and crisp, peeling it/in strips to bare/ . . . the soft russet flesh.” Neither is “Love, like water” afraid of the darks : “ . . .We thirst/for it, shrivel without it,/drown in too much.”

Or how about pairing the poem that precedes “Roasted Pepper,” and sits across it on the page, “Reading Poetry at the Fusion Café,” where “strangers offer up/a segment of their soul/and let me touch it,” and ‘Contact,” where the fur of a cat pressed up against the body in bed in the middle of the night causes the poet to “. . . touch something/that feels like a soul.”

There are the oranges offered and accepted in “In the Garden,” mirrored back by the lemons that are rejected in “Short History of a Marriage.” The fishing trip the father takes the eight-year-old daughter on in “Fishing,” and the fishing trip given up in favor of cleaning out the garage in “Touch me.” The fawn glimpsed across the train tracks in “Wallingford Station” and “Daydream,” in which the poet “would make love” on “a Tuesday/in the early morning/while we listen/to the slow drip/of icicles/into the birdbath/and geese squawk/in a V/above the commuter train/that we are not on.” Those icicles with those in “August Stairwell,” and the love-making with that in “Concerto.” The seeds in “Seeds,” “Lost children” and “To my unborn grandchild.”

I haven’t even mentioned yet the title poem, “Haiku: Shapes of Love,” that shows us dragonflies “joined end to end to form an H”; the “triangle” formed by a parent and an infant, “four eyes connecting,”; the stamens of a flower “with sticky pollen/summoning a bee,” and the “tight knot” of held hands. This final image can be paired with one of my favorite poems in this collection, “Snorkeling at Little St. James Island,” which gives silence a palpable and mystical quality: “Afternoon light slants/through stained-glass/water. Hand in hand/we glide across//the surface, soundless/but for breath/and the push of limbs/through liquid.” Joyce Meyers is a careful observer, unafraid of reporting what she sees, unafraid of clarity. Yet here, “We need not speak/of this; we see what we see.”

The effect of this small book of poems on a reader may be much like that of the experience related in this poem: “Behind our eyelids/a curtain stays open,/a window/on a different sky.”