Ecstasy When Love Rocks

You Drive Me Crazy: Love Poems for Real Life
by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez

Ah, the ecstasy of love. Who wants to settle for anything less? From the first second of our first major crush, ecstasy is what we hope for and dream of, that on-top-of-the-world, giddy, whirly, zing-zangy kaboom of a feeling that squeezes your heart and blows your mind and leaves you wanting to shout to the world, I AM SO IN LOVE SO IN LOVE SO CRAZY COMPLETELY IN LOVE!

Or something like that. Truth is, real ecstasy leaves us so overwhelmingly happy we're usually rendered speechless. We want to express our wild, hungry joy, especially to the person we love, but “I love you” seems so serious and standard, and beyond that, what's left? “You rock”? “Oh, baby”? “Gee, I think we're really compatible”? Ecstasy feels so HUGE, and words can seem so small.

That's why we filled this chapter with the most gorgeous, passion-packed love poems we could find, to help you articulate the ecstasy you feel. Recite one of these next anniversary, or slip a copy into a Valentine's Day card, and you'll melt the heart of your beloved.

Or read these poems by yourself when you just want to feel all warm and sappy about the great love of your life. These are poems to indulge in, like hotfudge sundaes or bubble baths or full-body massages. B e c a u se-d o n 't kid yourself-ecstasy comes and goes in a long-term love relationship (good luck feeling blissful about the holey underwear! the ESPN addiction! the secret porn stash!). You've got to relish the passion while you've got it. And even if you have one of those moments, days, or months when you fear the romance has drained from your relationship, stop and read an Ecstasy poem. Let yourself remember how it felt-how it could still feel-to be intimately, achingly in love with your partner.

The first four poems in Ecstasy describe that breathless, unspoken (because we don't quite know how to say it, and sometimes we're scared to) longing to be part of the very fiber and soul of your lover. The speaker in James Laughlin's “I Want to Breathe” utters one long, run-on whisper of desire, so quiet but so potent you can almost feel him nuzzling the skin and inhaling the fragrance of his lover, willing their hearts to beat in unison. He wants to be completely connected, physically and emotionally, as does the speaker in Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII, who tells his lover he wants to be “so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,/so close that your eyes close with my dreams.” The couple in Sharon Olds's “Sunday Night in the City” shares that same interlaced serenity; “Arms linked like skaters,” they lie in bed together, hair ruffled, “long legs crossed like folded/wings.”

This is ecstasy at its most seriously romantic- when the two of you exist in your own little world, when you're overcome by that heart-tugging need for intimacy. The lovers in these poems are bound together not so much by sex (even though they're physically tangled together) as by their deep, consuming care for each other. The speaker in Margaret Atwood's “Variation on the Word Sleep,” for example, wants to protect and nurture her lover even as he sleeps, even in his dreams. She speaks almost reverentially of wanting to hold him-his being, not his body-“carefully, a flame/in two cupped hands.” When we're deep into the ecstasy of love, no closeness is close enough; we can't bear to think that our partner could survive without us. Like the speaker in the Atwood poem, we want to be the very air that our lover breathes-we want to be “that unnoticed/& that necessary.”

On the one hand, the desire for that kind of closeness is perfectly understandable and probably inevitable when you're in ecstasy. You're in a love stupor, utterly intoxicated by the sight, scent, and touch of your partner. On the other hand … yikes! Ecstasy can leave you teetering on the edge of neediness and insecurity. Too much of that heavy-duty “we're the only two people in the world” business can suffocate even the most glorious romance. (Think Heathcliff and Cathy.) Who needs all the melancholy drama when you're supposed to be wildly happy? As much as you want to be one with your lover in ecstasy, eventually you need to develop a little healthy awareness that you two are indeed separate-wild about each other, sure, but separate-individuals who live in a great, big, wide world.

Perhaps that's why we so love the E. E. Cummings poem “i carry your heart with me”-it's fabulously romantic but shout-out-loud exuberant and playful at the same time. The speaker in this poem doesn't quietly yearn to be closer-he trumpets his joy at being close enough. He confidently declares, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in/my heart)”-separate hearts, carried together. He opens up his world to include not just his lover but also the sun and the stars and “the sky of the sky of a tree called life.”

This is ecstasy at its best, we think, when you can loosen up enough simply to enjoy the pleasure of the moment (rather than worrying about the future or longing for more of what you've got). Li-Young Lee's “From Blossoms,” for example, is all about the bliss of the here and now. As he and his partner devour “succulent peaches” bought at a roadside stand, the speaker is overcome by pure happiness, struck by his desire “to take what we love inside,/to carry within us an orchard … to hold/the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into/the round jubilance of peach.” He celebrates the opportunity to live-if only for one summer day-“from joy/to joy to joy, from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Copyright © 2005 by Mary Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez

About the Author

Elizabeth Ash Vélez lives in Washington, D.C.