Yes, You

The day after Valentine's Day, I went to the bookstore, because I go to the bookstore like every day. I don't have enough money to buy books every day, and I don't have enough time to read through a book every day, but I go anyway. Just look at the books and such. Anyway, I went to the Strand, and then I went across Union Square to the giant Barnes and Noble, and I started looking at the poetry books. As you know, it is never too early to start getting excited for National Poetry Month, and every year, around this time (or rather, that time, the day after Valentine's Day and continuing up to and through now), I decide to start revving up the poetry engine. So I stood in the little section and read two poems by Frank O'Hara and one by Anna Akhmatova and one by Ted Hughes. Then I realized that I couldn't remember the first line of the ee cummings poem that I had used as one of my Poems in my Pocket for Poem in Your Pocket Day 2008, and started flipping through one of the ee cummings Collected Poem books.

I eventually found the one that I was looking for -- "somewhere i have never traveled gladly beyond" -- but before that, the book fell open to a different poem, which is called "since feeling is first". The reason that the book fell open to that poem, is because the book had stuck in it at that page, as a sort of bookmark, a red construction paper heart, with "You are loved" written on the obverse, and "Yes, you" written on the reverse. This was strange.

The poem is very good -- it's about the textiness of life versus the feeling of life, the latter of which is represented by kissing and the former of which is represented by what's called, in the third line, "the syntax of things". The last line of the poem, which makes a bold claim along this axis (and which was the only line of the poem I remembered, and by which I just found it on google) is "And death i think is no parenthesis." Good stuff, romantic stuff. So what on earth did it mean that the book had a red construction paper heart, with that double message on it, next to this poem? I developed two sorts of theories.

A) On the first theory, the construction paper heart was stuck into the book while it was in private ownership, and then it was returned to the giant Barnes and Noble on 17th Street. This is actually a galaxy of mini-theories. Maybe someone gave it to their beloved, as a gift, and the beloved returned it. Maybe the beloved returned it because they failed to reciprocate the love of the lover. Maybe they returned it because they wanted a different book instead. Maybe someone prepared the book with the construction paper heart, realized that the beloved already owned the collected work of ee cummings, and took it back him- or herself. These theories, especially imagining the book as a Valentine's Day gift already repatriated the day after Valentine's Day, take their appropriate places across a spectrum of more or less sadness.

B) The other theory is weirder, and of course suggests the alternative explanation that the construction paper heart was neither forgotten nor unnoticed, but put into a book that had been, and remained, the property of Barnes and Noble. This is strange. Even I think that leaving messages in bookstore books is strange, and I once drafted (though wimped out of delivering) a note to whomever had checked out the first volume of In Search of Lost Time from the Lockport Public Library (my brilliant plan was to leave the note in Volume II, so that the person would have to prove her commitment before being invited into my Proust Appreciation Society). Maybe the person who left the heart loves everybody, or maybe the person just loves everyone who would read ee cummings. But why stick a message of love that is nothing more than syntax next to a poem all about the syntax-defeating power of kissing?

I didn't buy the book; I hope that someone has, and I hope they got something out of the construction paper heart, with its oddly insistent message, and that they enjoyed the poem next to it to believe and disbelieve the construction paper heart at the same time. Osculum vincit omnia. It's a strange thing to meet just words that tell you emphatically that you are loved: after all, life is not a paragraph. But I guess that the intervention wasn't just words, either: it was also a heart made out of red construction paper.