I never knew why my uncle, a panhandle Texan, liked to say “the only good thing ever come out of Oklahoma was an empty bus.” He should’ve met Steve Leyva, who comes out of Oklahoma and is a good thing. Leyva’s poems, published in Poetry, December 2024, made me feel tossed in a blanket of strong language.

The one titled “Limerence” teaches me a word recognized in psychology for a kind of morbid craving directed towards a non-reciprocating person.

What do we call this desire
to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow
to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani

at a sundress, a thigh,
a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail
glass. An olive in brine. […]

The poem cycles through reasons not to adorn a self-flagellating longing with tags such as “beauty,” “love” or “happiness”:

[…] Name it beauty

and chase will become
our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel.
Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?”

follows, rapturous, like a sparrow
pecking the ground. […]

The chase after “beauty” calls to mind my French teacher’s mention of Proust’s l’être en fuite — the “entity in flight” whom the obsessive pursues precisely because the object of desire is unattainable. The sun’s kneeling at the mention of “love” is confounding. That the brightest body in our local firmament be deemed to humble itself before Cupid spikes the cheapened tag with hyperbole. Where “happiness” is concerned (“Do I deserve this?”), I do get a whiff of a certain kind of person in the grip of self-loathing who spurns entitlement even to a vestige of it. Deliver from, ye gods.

  The gnarly crux of the poem is what follows to the end. It posits a break-out strategy from self-torpedoing which begins with a stab at original thinking. Take the owl, folksy emblem of “wisdom.” Remember: The quest is to release the sufferer from limerence by an act of creative reassesment through naming.

[…] Instead of wisdom, why not
wish for the owl’s heart

at night, seeing in the dark
more than a meal, but a place to sing. […]

Yes, an apex predator of the avian persuasion will pierce something furtive and furry with its talons, tear apart and digest it before the sun rises. But hearty violence is followed by sated exultation. Let that be what it is: a restorative fallback on one’s own core of vitality.

Don’t imagine
a dirge for the eaten. Conjure

an exhale instead:
the hoot of being alive. Name it
whatever you like.

It’s almost an appeal to the bloody-minded revulsion over “woke”-ness that’s cresting in the likes of Wyoming. Break free of hackneyed sentiment and sloppy sympathies! “The hoot of being alive” is a bit of overreach, but Leyva’s entitled (he’s from OK).

I can’t process this text intellectually into crystalline clarity. It’s a poem, after all. It did, however, send a spark through me on first reading, and I pay attention to that. Perhaps I should have let it lie where it perched, darkly singing, but it ends with an imperative.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved