Recorded live on the La Virkin Creek Trail in Kolob Canyon, Zion National Park, May 2025. You’ll hear the wind noise pretty prominently at times, and I’m sorry if it annoys you. Not sorry enough to do anything about it, because I personally find it kind of charming.
Text of poem
“Variations on the Word Love” by Margaret Atwood
This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go.
In this recording, as usual I break down some of my favorite lines/images/phrases, but I also use it to help illustrate my favorite definition of what poetry is: saying with words something that cannot be expressed in words. Which is a paradox, yes. But poetry is a paradox. And that’s why so many people dislike it.
I had originally written “that’s why so many people struggle with it,” but I realized that “struggling” is the point at issue here. Good poetry will always require some effort, some struggle. Poetry is trying to hang out at the edge of what language can do. All good poems are trying to say, “there’s no word in the language for this thing, and I’m going to try to explain it to you.” That’s what Atwood is trying to do here. Is it any wonder that it requires a little bit of effort from the reader? And in this case, don’t you feel just a little bit that you want to explain it better than she does? I hope you do, and I hope you try.
One of my favorite things on this hike was seeing all the flora and fauna. I of course like hiking with all the dramatic cliffs and geology, but I always get a thrill when I see a firecracker penstemon (penstemon eatonii) in glorious, full bloom.
And many, many lizards. I edited out of the recording where I saw a lizard and then went quiet for a full minute just watching it watching me. I think this is a western whiptail (aspidoscelis tigris), which is one of the cooler names for a lizard.
Strava recorded my hike as 15.88 miles, which I think is slightly exaggerated, but boy howdy were my knees feeling it by the end. Absolutely worth it, but it took a day to recover. I’m certainly glad it wasn’t warmer, and I’m glad to be getting back to my home turf tomorrow.
All is well,
Jeff
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