Lynn Xu

Introduction by Katie Peterson

Love is the only thing worth anything. Separation from love is torture. In matters of love, even the most ordinary person becomes a movie star. When a true lover goes out for dinner even the most American hamburger finds itself answering a hunger so great that hunger verges on greed. For love, nothing less than everything is enough. So no music is appropriate for love save aria. And yet love is nonetheless doomed. All love affairs find in earthly limitation a transgression against the infinite possibility of complete union. Lynn Xu writes: “Man / Makes love and love makes Rome. In Rome apart / from you / This autumn is a dream.” The beloved is everything to the lover and the heart will not tolerate limitation or separation, will not tolerate anything that is not the lover: without love, life is a dream. Love suicides, confessions of indiscretion, hidden meetings and secret places, dramatic meetings in airports and hotels in foreign places, poems written inside passports, poems passed through the bars of prisons: these are love to us not because we idealize love but because love is ideal and in our real hearts it clutches moments with a desperation that verges on joy. Writes Crane: Permit me voyage love into these hands.

If your heart lifts even at one of these thoughts it lifts at all of them: if your heart knows one of these thoughts to be true, if you have ever met someone against all odds or clandestinely, if you have ever gone to jail for someone or merely been in trouble on their behalf, if you have ever believed that organ donation for your lover is not merely useful but kind of hot, the poems of Lynn Xu are for you. They are for you because what you know is that love is the only way we have about talking about death because it’s the only thing worth losing. What edges love has in Lynn Xu’s poetry; what real vertigo love calls us towards. Yes, jumping off a building and loving someone are the same feeling. No, they do not produce the same result. So the poems tumble from joy to grief, from elation to despair – from love to death. I give Xu credit for showing me what a rainbow of ordinary and dramatic love and death seem to have to be. Her declarations are equal parts elegance and flippancy while staying all song: “Foliage and cleavage sail like confetti onto our voyage.” What a perishable permission; what a moody send-off! But if Lynn Xu is a drama queen she’s also the soccer mom of the Absolute. These poems light fires but they also take out the trash. They run away to Mexico but they also watch TV in the not-so-good old USA. I read their cocky contemplations and I thank Zeus that people still know they can live like this and feel like this. Since I rely on my poetry to renew and enable my perceptions, I thank Lynn Xu who is Aphrodite’s new true daughter sent to remind us how glorious even our failures are.

Our Love is Pure

Man

Makes love and love makes Rome. In Rome apart

From you

This autumn is a dream. I fell

Into the sea. Through the French trees. My heart

Became a suite in the Carlyle, compels you

To undress.

Foliage and cleavage sail like confetti onto our voyage.

Statues forgetting to crawl into death from the balconies

And battlefields. Love

From the battlefields. My blood went to breath

Like a younger poet, who made the dove

Crawl into a handkerchief. In the face of the poet, it’s important to track

Which features are your own.

So age has brought lace from the sea onto your face.

Say past

These infrared trees, lay darkness sublime as stirred melodies.

III

Mind evaporates briefly twisting in

Little disappearances

Of meat. Fish

Meat everywhere mind is

Staring

Into your eyes.

Cloudless

Eyes. Ebi

Shinjo starry

Skies.

Friends to whom I belong. Friends who I will wrong.

excerpts from Enemy of the Absolute

Writing always from so far away.

And in my white blouse, squirting this plastic, neon gun at you.

The Mexico we are still young from,

Faking our own deaths

As children, shaking our futures

Before your eyes, now the dead

Will throw its shadow upon the road, how warm the night is

With these feelings you’ve been avoiding.

The summer we spent

In Oaxaca, with its mysterious borders and skeletons

Is at the same time inconceivable

And without eternity. Enemies we continued to have

Over some delayed letter

Adieu, adieu. I kiss you friend

A thousand times.

III

So they teach us that eternity is

Not always where the mind is, nor held in judgment

By its furnishings, a beautiful sunset

Of human spirit.

Humid night.

Hamburger in mind, mind

White towel of imagery.

Weapons that turn outward to connect

With the harmony of things come not now

From the mind.

Now people are at their windows shouting

At the inauspicious signs

To extinguish the outcome of everything.

All day yesterday was night.

Black

Mechanical clouds banging

In our rooms we wrestled each other to the ground

And lay there.

From the outside

We are all tormented, jangling our bracelets

From heaven, its rural scent of knowing

What acts are now before us.

Perfect blue of the galaxy.

Stars that paddle across our eyes, across the yogurt and dream

Of the Persian Gulf

Have no gunmen to the fault.

Nor in the prehensile television of our minds

To retrace what we’ve killed, playing

Tricks on the dead.

Loose cardigan. Back

In the dormitory to read all night being

Years ago.

Sonnet

Terror. The chocolate machine glistens

In the night. The universe hangs on this

Malheur. Mal de Mer. The sea-worm listens

To its Latin noise, mingling parti pris

With the bastion of deal, its missing knob,

Terra infidel, how the lunar month

Makes appetite with its special eye. Slob

Jelly on eyelids slagged with salt. The month

Cannot end like this. And wanting nothing

Of this in mind the mind-englutted touch

Torches its prime. Spoils of influence. Thing

Is. The world must end. Must fascinate such

And such torment to mortgage its dark chase.

Déjenos. Let us go. Buenas noches.