Robert Creeley rocks my world. I just rediscovered this poem of his in the back of a notebook I kept during my senior year of high school, when I was prone to hiding in the aisles of big chain bookstores and copying down poems that caught my fancy rather than buying the volumes in which I'd found them. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that I'd already paid for most of this notebook's purloined poems in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, which became one of my prized possessions at the Waterloo Poetry Festival my junior year (see Poem for D.H. Lawrence if you're interested in that). This one's an exception to that little irony: make of that what you will.
Now, a little poetic explication: as mentioned earlier, Creeley rocks my world. His poetry is simple to the point of sparseness, but always displays a masterful way with words. He's in top form with this poem, which in twelve short lines, four stanzas, goes from extremely plain and direct, yet poignant, naturalistic images about a particular lover to an exultation about love in general. I think it's super-cool.
Oh Love
My love is a boat
floating
on the weather, the water.
She is a stone
at the bottom of the ocean.
I hold her
in my hand
and cannot lift her,
can do nothing
without her. Oh love,
like nothing else on earth!
---Robert Creeley