The Atlantic | January/February 2003 | Love Work

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Home
Current Issue
Back Issues
Premium Archive
Forum
Site Guide
Feedback
Search

Subscribe
Renew
Gift Subscription
Subscriber Help

Browse >>
  Books & Critics
  Fiction & Poetry
  Foreign Affairs
  Politics & Society
  Pursuits & Retreats

Subscribe to our free
e-mail newsletters

More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2003

Love Work

by Gardner McFall

.....

Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)

My love, travel to me quickly for time
strikes like a ruler slapped on a pupil's hand.
Put work aside, worry, too, all the Midwest
Presbyterian principles I once loved you for
and still do. I have learned there's more
to our being here, so tenuous and brief,
than securing sums for retirement. After that, we'll be
past caring about all we own save each other,
hand to hand, and what we may have stored
from the grind, grit, from gratifying sweet
instances, compounded through desire and will.
Tick tick goes the time clock. I hear it
in the recent statements of our industry,
collected fast in a binder like a rebuke.

What do you think? Discuss this article in the Books & Literature conference of Post & Riposte.

Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot's Daughter (1996), a collection of poems, and the editor of Made With Words, a prose miscellany by May Swenson.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]