Almost everything in Al Fowler's «I Want You» is built from one plain sentence, "i want you", and the drama lies in how far it gets stretched. The poem opens on a single body under an open sky and ends with the whole planet as a bed. What looks like a simple declaration of desire turns out to be a claim about where love belongs: out in the elements, in the open, wherever there happens to be space.
The construction is spare. Four times the speaker says "i want you", and the one variation, "i want the / feel of under you", arrives just as the poem's syntax starts to strain. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The pulse comes from the refrain and from very short lines that make the reader pause where ordinary speech wouldn't. The poem is also lowercase throughout, uses an ampersand instead of "and", and has no punctuation until the final full stop. That makes it sound unguarded, like something said aloud without editing. It also turns the poem into one long sentence of wanting, which is only allowed to finish when the lovers are finally lying down.
The imagery is drawn almost entirely from nature, and it is more compressed than it first seems. "The sun in your / forehead & spread hair" fuses light and body, and it quietly shows a person lying back with hair fanned out. Then comes "the grass around your thighs / making no mistakes / of roundness". The phrase is odd, almost geometric, as if the body were a drawing and the grass were checking its curves. The line break after "mistakes" leaves a brief moment of suspense, and what follows is a compliment: nothing about this body, or the way the earth fits it, is wrong. The beloved is barely described, with only forehead, hair and thighs. Most of the poem's energy goes into the setting, so the setting becomes part of the love.
The middle of the poem widens the frame. "In water & the air" adds the remaining elements, and the sun has already supplied warmth. Then the speaker makes a conditional promise: "as long as there is / ocean". The line "ocean" stands alone, surrounded by white space, which is a neat way of showing something vast. "As long as" sounds like the language of vows, and "on the same earth" insists that these two people share one world. The promise is only as lasting as the planet itself.
The strangest moment comes next: "i want the / feel of under you / a planet / rhythmic as / love / giving all quarter". The grammar is deliberately loose, and a reader can take it in more than one way. The beloved may become the planet, or the speaker may be imagining the ground beneath both of them. The break after "rhythmic as" makes us wait for the comparison, and the single word "love" then lands like a beat. "Giving all quarter" seems to play on the military phrase "give no quarter", which means to show no mercy. Here the planet is merciful and offers shelter instead, and the word may also hint at "quarters" as lodging. This is an inference from the wording, but it fits the poem's movement from battle-free tenderness to a home made of earth.
The ending is where the poem becomes most interesting. After a run of short lines, the last is the longest: "wherever there is room enough / to lie down." After sky, ocean and planet, the desire shrinks to something modest and almost practical. The speaker asks for no grand setting, only enough space to rest. The final words "lie down" also quietly chime with "sky" in the second line, so the poem ends where it began, but lower and calmer.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it avoids the usual showiness of love poetry. It piles up no elaborate compliments and shows off no clever rhymes. It trusts repetition, line breaks and a handful of elemental images to carry the feeling. It also finds a surprising size for desire, large enough to include oceans and air, but humble enough to be satisfied by a patch of ground. Nothing in the text tells us who "you" is, and that openness lets the poem feel less like a private message than a general claim: that love needs very little, and finds it almost everywhere.