They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century
They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.
It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it’s hard to say
how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.
You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency
seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.
The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.
Copyright © 2013 by Maureen McLane. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on July 1, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"This poem will appear in my forthcoming book This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)—a book devoted in part to ecology and transformations of courtly love, not least Dante's vision. The poem most likely springs from ongoing reading in and around Dante and Petrarch and troubadours as well as reading in the book of life. I'm interested in historical and lyrical conjunctures: contemporary intimacies and opacities, shot through by deep pasts and unknown futures."
—Maureen McLane
Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane studied at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Chicago, where she received a PhD in English in 1997.