| Poem: Variations On Love |
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By Margaret Atwood
This is a word we use to plug holes with.
It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech,
for those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page
that look nothing like real hearts.
Add lace and you can sell it.
We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions.
There are whole magazines with not much in them
you can rub it all over your body
and you can cook with it too.
How do we know it isn't what goes on at
the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard?
As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces,
they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers,
raising their glittering knives in salute.
Then there's the two of us.
This word is far too short for us,
it has only four letters,
too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough
but it will have to do.
It's a single vowel in this metallic silence,
a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain,
a breath,
a finger grip on a cliffside.
You can
hold on or let go.
