Read Online You Drive Me Crazy by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez - Free Book Online Page A

point of view. After a frustrating stretch of bad love, it's tough to put forth the effort. But look to the speaker in James Wright's “Mary Bly” for inspiration. “I sit here, doing nothing, alone, worn out by long winter,” he begins. Then slowly he starts noticing the newborn baby, from her “light breath” to her face “smooth as the side of an apricot.” Suddenly, as he watches the baby's “delicate hands/weave back and forth,” he feels “the seasons changing beneath [him].” The winter starts to thaw in him, and he sees the possibility of new beginnings, new joy. Where he was listless before, now he is fanciful, imagining the baby's hands “braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes/of happy colts” who “canter, without making a sound, along the shores/of melting snow.”
    That kind of transformation is possible in clarity, if you're open to working at it. You may think your relationship is beyond repair, but then you see your partner in a new light, or you reconsider your own tough-to-live-with personality. If you try, like the speaker in William Carlos Willams 's “The Ivy Crown,” to look back at the “sorry facts” of your relationship and see roses instead of thorns, you just might find yourself back in love again. All it takes to survive in love, he says, is a little imagination and a whole lot of will. It doesn't mean you have to delude yourself about the truth. You can still say with complete honesty, “Sure / love is cruel / and selfish / and totally obtuse.” But at the same time you can believe that the love you share with your partner is a “jeweled prize.”
    Again, it's all about perspective. Yes, love can be a jeweled prize, but you work damn hard to win it. So if you do decide in clarity to make love work again, don't downplay the enormousness of the undertaking. Give yourself a little credit, pat yourself on the back when you can, and realize you're not alone in your struggle to keep love alive—you're taking on one of humankind's oldest and biggest challenges, according to Margaret Atwood's “Habitation.” Long-term commitment, marriage in particular, is a primitive exercise, like “learning to make fire,” says the speaker. At least we're trying to warm ourselves, and at least we're learning together, but still, we evolve in love “painfully and with wonder/at having survived even/this far.”
    And if you find in clarity that you need to let go of an old love, don't feel that you've failed—loss is a necessary part of evolution. The relationship may not have survived, but you have. Now you need to prepare your heart to move on, so you can learn to love again. That means taking a last hard look at what you had, then letting yourself feel whatever grief or regret remains. The wistful speaker in Frank O'Hara's “Animals” wishes his relationship could have stayed as perfect as it once was; he declares, “I wouldn't want to be faster/or greener than now if you were with me O you/were the best of all my days.” And even though the logical speaker in Louise Glück's “Earthly Love” realizes that her shattered relationship was a “deception” and a series of errors, she still says she would do it all again, because within it “true happiness occurred.”
    But you can't linger too long in the past, searching for clarity, or you'll never move forward. In James Wright's “The Journey,” the speaker, taking a walk on a windy day, finds himself covered in dust, rather the way you might feel after you've just come out of a long-term relationship, when you can't quite shake off the past. The speaker pauses to wash off his face (to find a little clarity, we might say) and notices a spider web “whose hinges/reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,/Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging” (a perfect metaphor for what your old relationship looks like). As he watches, the spider herself appears, “slender and fastidious, the golden hair/of daylight along her