
I was recently the matron of honor in my best friend’s wedding. Leave it to me to forget, until a day before the wedding, that I had to write a speech.
Thankfully, poetry came to the rescue. Writing might be hard, but interpreting poetry is something I feel a bit better about, these days, and the final line from Jack Gilbert’s The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart has been haunting me since I first read it.
Rather than rehashing the entire speech, I’ll just say that I think love is expressed differently by every person who expresses it, and sometimes that expression is unexpected or, to outsiders, mundane.
I feel pretty strongly about destroying genre boundaries and high brow/low brow distinctions, so the idea that anything is trivial just doesn’t resonate with me. Who is this grand arbiter of taste that gets to decide whether something is meaningful or not?
I might have some bitterness attached to this issue. Anyway, here’s a drabble.