STATE LINES
Writing a good love poem isn’t as easy as it looks. How does the poet describe such inscrutable feelings with words, while also avoiding shopworn phrases from all the great love poems of the past? (Shakespeare alone seems to have cornered the market.) Specificity helps — of image, sensation and place. The beechnut tree in this poem is the tool Arisa White needs to describe her feelings. It has texture, shape, strength and substance of its own. White uses the tree’s heartiness as a symbol for the couple’s endurance, yet it is also a location of shared memory — a place where the couple first fell in love, perhaps, where “What is sown is / resilient.”
Beechnut
Winter in the mountains, the beech twisted into paper we could use. In that classic way, seen on TV, wanting one day to be that girl, you revealed your Swiss army knife and the bark knew we would. Maybe we scared away the owls who may have nested there. Our initials traveled to heart, aged our presence to diaphanous, to shirr between thought and sometimes we move on. What is sown is resilient. Shells grow spines; the nut, a sweet portion, hints close and it’s how I come to understand our touch. Woodwinds have memory. I haven’t advanced beyond “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and the tapping on the streetlamp was often opposite notes. We engineered shepherds to herd our swords — Oakland felt similar disharmony and built a lake to meet the need for breath and matter. Water finds scent and apology and people to beach on its cusp. Reminds the heart there are summer dresses to be worn, and twirling that happens in them. “Beechnut” is from “You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened” (c) 2016 by Arisa White. Appears with the permission of Augury Books. All rights reserved.
“You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened” is Arisa White’s third book of poems. She will be a visiting poet at the University of San Francisco this fall.