Maggie Millner's Couplets

 

1.1

All my life I've shown up late.

  But when I do, I compensate

for my delay--I laugh and preen and carry on

  as if I had been present all along.

I stayed in utero, for instance, two

  weeks after I was due,

then came out so decisively and fast

  I couldn't breathe. I spent my first

night on earth alone inside a tent

  flushed full of oxygen, the event

from which (my dad believes)

  have sprung like fires all my weird anxieties.

Mostly I can't see myself at all

  until I sense in someone else a parallel,

like how I only realize what

  I want at the moment I attain it,

my mind the final part of me to know.

  I've hurt people I love by being so

late to my desires. Last year, I met someone I thought

  I couldn't live without, and in the process lost

another, without whom I thought I'd

  die. If I had only realized

sooner, etc., etc. But I handled things ineptly

  and he left. I didn't die. Instead, I went to therapy

and saw the stegosaur uptown, stayed with friends

  and drank a lot of tea. Even then,

riding the bus to visit my new lover,

  I was breathless always, early almost never.

-Maggie Millner

That's the opening (after an introductory proem) of Maggie Millner's verse novel, Couplets: A Love Story, which came out earlier this year. The (female) narrator had a serious boyfriend for years--they'd talked about marriage and kids, but hadn't decided for sure on either--when she falls in love with an older woman and dumps her longstanding boyfriend. Does it work out? That's our drama.

I'm a sucker for verse novels--Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, Douglas Dunn's The Donkey's Ears, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Iliad--especially if they at least nod to formal poetics. 

This one consists of fifty sections, of about the length of the one quoted, divided into four books, making up 102 pages. (So actually a novella?) Most of the poems are like this, in couplets that allow slant rhyme and of varied line length, but some consist of a prose poem ending with a short rhyming line. The writing suggests autobiographicality, in much the way In Search of Lost Time suggests it, with its narrator named Marcel, but I don't know how autobiographical the story actually is. One of the blurbs calls it steamy, but it mostly makes me, living in the provinces, think NYC sex lives are way too complicated... 😉

Still, it's a pretty fun read, moving along well, and you feel like you know the narrator by the end. (Though less so the ex-boyfriend, or the new lover.) I liked the verse, which offers the occasional suggestive line. ("I was breathless always, early almost never.")