Juvenal Soto’s “I Don’t Know What to Title This” is a love poem stripped of comfort. Its central question arrives early and keeps returning: “What else could you possibly offer me / But your very flesh?” The line is both an accusation and a last hope. The speaker does not ask for reconciliation, memory, or spiritual closeness. Ruins, the poem implies, are not a home; he would rather claim the body than take “refuge” in a damaged soul. The phrase “fifty years” tolls twice, turning the poem into a long-delayed reckoning rather than a fresh desire.
That refusal of the soul’s “ruins” is sharpened by the image of the “Barbarian / From the siege of Rome’s legions.” The speaker imagines hiding inside the other person as a defeated outsider might hide among broken walls, an image of humiliation rather than intimacy. Against it, flesh is the one thing that cannot be romanticised into ruin—though it is still marked by time. The middle of the poem presents “a feast of shattered bulbs / Among festoons of crimson crepe paper / Faded by time,” a party gone stale, its bright paper bleached. Comparing the scene to “debris strewn about the shore” makes even celebration sound like wreckage. In that decayed setting the question sharpens: “What else could you give to the one who had been your master / but your very flesh?” The word “master” quietly changes the relationship. It suggests a history of power, perhaps servitude or command. The addressee, the speaker says, has met him with “the farewell of hostile winter” rather than the “greetings / Of those who open their lives to summer.” So the demand for flesh becomes a demand for warmth and entrance, for the opposite of closed-off cold.
Then the poem turns openly heretical. The speaker calls on God to “take his holiday” and invites Lucifer “to this tenement,” bringing “nights and pearls” and “the laughter of his cats.” The tone is not conventional devil-worship but a search for fiercer vitality. The visitor is desired because he carries fire, and the speaker dreams of stealing it—“Like a jewel stolen / In the tavern of those who love.” Love here is not a church sacrament but a tavern theft; it happens among risk, and its treasure must be taken by force. Even the devil’s animals laugh, suggesting a world more alive than the faded crepe paper left from decades of waiting.
Formally, the poem is free verse, built from long rhetorical questions and abrupt, almost prose-like statements. There is no rhyme, but the repeated word “flesh” imposes its own structure. The rhythm is halting: short phrases like “Fifty years” interrupt longer syntactic waves, so the poem sounds like a mind circling the same demand. Each time the question returns, it gathers more desperation: at first the speaker asks what could be offered, then what could be given to “the one who had been your master,” and finally what could “halt the music and disperse the carnival / Where not even oblivion dances.” A carnival should be full of movement and forgetting; if oblivion itself cannot dance there, the gaiety has become hollow repetition. Only the body, the speaker insists, could interrupt that ghostly party. But the poem does not promise that it will. It ends not with possession but with an enormous, deathly image: “Fifty years, and the moon, / Immense as the chill of the drowned.” The moon is not romantic; it is vast and cold, shaped like the memory of a corpse. The final image freezes the demand in place, leaving the reader unsure whether flesh is a real possibility or a desperate hope against that drowning cold.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to settle for the consolations of memory or spiritual love. It insists that after long ruin, after faded celebration, only the physical presence of another person—warm, risky, demanding—would count. At the same time, that repeated “fifty years” and the drowned moon shadow the insistence with loss. The poem is therefore both a carnal prayer and an elegy for whatever was never given.