Love's Mutability Poem by gershon hepner

Love’s mutability disturbs
the poets who put love upon
a pedestal, for change perturbs
conclusions that should be foregone,
but aren’t predicted when you fall
in love, although they should, for change
is what life’s all about, though all
predict erroneously long range.

Disturbances when atmospheric
affect the weather, but love alters
when the marriage of true minds, chimeric,
by tempests never shaken, falters,
because there is no guarantee
for love that is time’s fool, and prone
to massive mutability
with which it in the wind is blown.

Inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXVI (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) and Liesl Schillinger’s review of Rivka Galchen book (“Who Do You Love? ” NYT Book Review, July 13,2008) :

You don’t have to be a weatherman to see that Galchen’s brainteasing book, whatever its pretexts, is an exploration of the mutability of romantic love. Although she has intellectualized and mystified her subject, intentionally obscuring it in a dry-ice fog of pseudoscience, the emotional peaks beneath her cloud retain their definition. The reader senses Rema’s anguish, whether or not Leo has empathy for it. Captive to his soothing psychosis, Leo can’t see his wife as anything but an impersonator, her voice “less sharp, less fiercely lovable, less accented than Rema’s, ” her grip too firm, her hair incorrectly styled. He tells her, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do, ” but he’s the stranger. “It’s you, ” Rema sobs, “It’s you who’s not yourself.” Anyone who has suffered the everyday calamity of the lessening of love, the infinitesimal diminutions of regard that drain a relationship of its power, knows what a relief it would be to blame science fiction. This cerebral, demanding, original new writer helps make the charges stick.


7/17/08