Ronald H. Bayes’s “Makura-Kotoba” begins with amazement and ends with a plan of attack, already refusing the usual shape of romance. Five irregular, mostly unrhymed stanzas move from confession through wakefulness to an ordinary morning of hot coffee and parting. The central idea is not that love will last; the poem admits that love “usually passes / with flowers and years.” Yet the two speakers choose to honor it anyway, guarding themselves with wit so that grief cannot make their tenderness sentimental.
The first stanza turns distance into shared confession. The couple has come “from far ends,” and what amazes them is not passion but the discovery that each “was cowardly too, / two years ago.” The word “cowardly” is crucial: it renames hesitation as a tender, forgivable failure rather than a betrayal. Their laughter at the confession makes the past safe to hold. The second stanza then defines their position with the address “my cynical dear.” The phrase yokes affection and suspicion, and the verb in “We joy in such presence” is deliberately odd—joy becomes an action, not a passive state. They can admit that love “usually passes” while “still honoring it,” as if transience were part of what they honor rather than a reason to turn away.
The middle stanzas shift to the intimate space of bed and early morning. At four, the speaker listens to “your heavy breathing” for two hours and adds, “I refused to sleep.” The repetition of “sleep” is not careless; the refusal is willed attention, a decision to stay awake inside the beloved’s presence. The adjective “heavy” makes the breathing bodily and real, not angelic. Later, after sun comes “through shades,” the speaker sees “the perfect flower / of your ear on my inner arm.” The ear is a strange choice for beauty—curved, folded, pressed by sleep into flesh—but calling it a “perfect flower” turns the ordinary body into something worth quiet celebration. The word “Celebrated” sits at the start of a line after a period, giving the next hour the weight of ritual.
The final stanza is the poem’s most self-protective turn. Parting happens “with hot coffee / and without grief,” the ordinary drink replacing tears. In place of crying, the two plan “outrageous attacks on future years / to keep our hearts as dry as wit / whatever our eyes think of it.” The phrase “dry as wit” is bracing: it wants emotion to have the clarity and control of a good joke, not the wetness of weeping. Yet “whatever our eyes think of it” quietly admits that the body may not obey. The eyes may fill anyway; the strategy is to let the mind refuse what the eyes feel.
Formally, the poem relies on free verse line breaks that isolate decisive phrases: “I refused to sleep,” “Celebrated / quietly another hour,” “whatever our eyes think of it.” Slant sound-linkages such as dear and years, wit and it hold the stanzas together without heavy rhyme. The title, a Japanese term for a pillow word, suggests both the bed as setting and language as an intimate, almost ceremonial naming. The poem’s significance lies in that combination: it treats love as worthy of ritual not because it is eternal, but because it is passing, and because two people can choose dry-eyed courage in front of that truth.