PURE&LOVE

There is a turn of phrase that I startle to hear myself say. It came to me by way of a friend who has passed, but it is only in the wake of his passing that the syntax—common enough that I might have picked it up anywhere—lights a route back toward him in my mind. This is, of course, what grief does: In making felt the rending, it clarifies the shared terms of love’s expansive geography occluded by the daily fiction of self-sufficiency.

Ahmad Almallah’s “PURE&LOVE” opens by refusing the dominant logics that insist on relation as a rigid ordering of discrete parts. “the object / doesn’t / exist— // thus: no / one is / drawn // to another,” he writes. Even as the poem denies the hierarchical scheme in which one party is fixed as object—their meaning figured in service of an other who acts on them—it also disorders its own meanings; where the short lines give language over to the page’s blank field, what exists outside of speech is invited to enter, unbinding the semantic enclosures to make way for variegated forms of connection. For example, when “thus: no one is” disassembles into “thus: no” and “one is,” I hear anew the assertive presence sounding inside the negation, the being that abides within absence. And when I read the word “drawn” suspended on its own line, I can see it hovering over the poem like an open hand, not only holding “the design” of authorship, but reaching toward the gorgeous unwieldiness of co-creation—which, in truth, all creation is—made evident when “two // are drawn // together—”

– Claire Schwartz