by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
There are thousands upon thousands of poems about love, many of them using predictable words, predictable rhymes. Ho-hum. But here the Illinois poet Lisel Mueller talks about love in a totally fresh and new way, in terms of table salt.
Love Like Salt
It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher
It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought
It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it
We carry a pinch behind each eyeball
It breaks out on our foreheads
We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins
At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Question for the membership: What makes this poem work, if you feel it’s working well? What pitfalls do some poets fall into when writing love poems?
It works in how it focuses and makes “love” concrete, this speaker’s “love.” I like it, especially since it goes well with this week’s prompt about food.
We take salt for granted, and at times, we take love for granted. It was a fine use of allegory or whatever it is called to speak of one thing and use it to illustrate something else.
Because it was pretty spot on.
These lines about love are pretty down to earth, it “breaks out on our foreheads,” and “we step on it.” It’s sweat, it’s grit, it’s not at all fanciful, sentimental. And that’s the pitfall poets who write about love fall into – they think fantasy, illusion, sentiment – as Kooser says – Ho hum.”