Most of the time when I go down internet rabbit holes once the kids are in bed, it’s a waste of time. (And yet I keep doing it…) But some evenings I’ll come across a nugget that makes all those clicks and YouTube videos worth it.
Such was the case the other night. I ended up listening to Jack Antonoff describe the moment he saw his bride Margaret Qualley on their wedding day.
Why has this not gone viral? This is such an authentic, romantic, and non-cliché description that I’m still thinking about it days later.
“Authentic” seems like an attribute that will be even more rare and cherished as AI crops up.
A professor friend shared a slide on social media that she uses in her university classes to prompt discussion about the ethical use of AI: How would you feel if your lover used ChatGPT to write their wedding vows? And what’s the difference between this and giving your lover a Hallmark card?
Speaking of lovers (since Valentine’s Day is around the corner), I wanted to share this piece by one of my favourite contemporary poets who is also the current poet laureate of the United States, Ada Límon.
“Lover” by Ada Límon
Easy light storms in through the window, soft
edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s
nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,
I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh
in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely
excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
lover, come back to the five and dime. I could
squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,
a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape
of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt
and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned
for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.
She says this about the poem on poets.org:
Indeed, what a word….lover. Like Taylor Swift talks about in this video on writing her hit song “Lover” (incidentally produced with Jack Antonoff), I also don’t use “lover” in everyday speech. I never refer to my husband this way. Except in a poem. I happened to be reading Límon’s poem when I was editing my poetry chapbook and her love for “lover” made me change the second last line of “Sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum.” It used to say: “My love tells me stop / reading museum words.” I changed it to “My lover tells me stop / reading museum words.” Sounds better, doesn’t it?
It’s been almost nine years since I married my lover. I remember thinking it then and I still think it now, “I don’t really know what love is” or perhaps more accurately, “I’m not really sure I know how to love well.”
I do know that love is specific. It’s in the “godlike details” as I say in my video poem. Details are what makes a poem or story work. I think a relationship too. I joke (but am also serious) that one of the most romantic things my husband has ever done was strain all the decorative rocks out of this glass bowl, unprompted, when he was cleaning the bathroom where it used to live.
I came into the kitchen where the rocks were drying on a tea towel on the kitchen table, evenly spread out like he was preparing cookies on a baking sheet, and I was amazed. Pretty sure I looked at him like this:
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self this story on her wedding day, what would she have thought? From ice skating on Grouse Mountain and sipping hot chocolate to cleaning the dust off aquarium rocks…is this love’s evolution? As a poet, I assumed words would be enough (don’t get me wrong, I DO love giving and receiving them), but as I’ve grown older and the demands of being a mom to three young kids has increased, I’ve come to appreciate acts of love more than I ever anticipated. My lover cooks, cleans, picks up the groceries, changes poopy diapers, fills the van with gas, makes me a latte every morning, even takes the kids out for an hour so I can write this post and enjoy some rare quiet.
We joke (or justify our poor decision making) that in this demanding stage of life, we are allowed to waste away our evenings on the internet because we are so exhausted by day’s end and we crave something mindless. “I can’t wait to waste my life away with you,” as bülow sings.
Sometimes even just sitting beside each other on the couch as we go down our separate rabbit trails (and share the nuggets) is enough.
Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!