"Love Poem" Linda Pastan

The Writer's Almanac offers its daily poem:

Love Poem

I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other

Even better is to go to the Writer's Almanac and listen to Garrison Keillor read it. The musical introduction to the segment is very evocative for me, and so I catch it almost every day, either on the radio or on the web.

On a second hearing, I think that Garrison's reading is just a tad too ponderous for my taste. I think with a poem that features short, unrhymed lines, you almost have to flow through the line breaks when reading it, or it just sounds too disjointed. Bukowski and cummings are other good examples of this; you don't want to read them with a pronounced pause at each line break, or you'll never figure out what's happening. I prefer the sound of reading from thought to thought rather than line to line.