Six short lines, one unbroken sentence, and no punctuation beyond a single ampersand: Hollo gives love a very small room and fills it with a surprisingly large idea. The poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, so it starts mid-thought, as if we had walked in on a conversation already under way. Stripped down, it says that when lovers give their attention to the particular, repeated demands of devotion, they stop being merely two individuals and become the patterns themselves. In doing so they step into a kind of time where everyone else is allowed to carry on imperfectly.
The first two lines are dense and abstract. "Attending" is a rich choice because it means paying attention, but it also carries the sense of waiting on someone, of tending, of being present. The lovers are not conquering or enjoying anything here; they are in service. What they serve is "certain / forms of insistence," and "certain" is pleasantly double-edged. It can mean particular, as in "certain people", or it can mean sure, beyond doubt. The line break after it lets both meanings hang for a moment. "Forms of insistence" is deliberately vague about what insists. It could be desire, habit, the pull of another person's needs, or the way love keeps repeating itself in small rituals. The word "forms" also nudges us to think about poetry, since a poem's form is a kind of insistence too, a shape that keeps returning.
The third line is the pivot, and the plainest: "lovers become those forms." The demonstrative "those" points back at what came before, and the verb "become" makes the change complete. Attention does not just direct the lovers; it remakes them. There is something faintly unsettling in this, since people turn into shapes, but also something freeing, because the lovers no longer need to be clever or original. Hollo repeats the word "forms" in two consecutive lines, and the repetition acts out the insistence it describes.
Then the poem widens. "& enter the core time" is the most intriguing phrase. "Core" suggests a centre, the heart of things, while "core time" also sounds a little like the language of workplaces, where core hours are the stretch of the day when everyone has to be present. I'm inferring that echo from the wording rather than knowing it was intended, but if it is there it adds a dry humour: love as the one compulsory appointment. The ampersand helps here too. It is quick and informal, so the move into this special time feels almost casual, a step through a doorway rather than a grand ascent.
What love buys is not happiness or glory but something stranger. In that time "the tribe is permitted / to muddle on." "Tribe" shrinks the whole of humanity to a small, old-fashioned, slightly comic group, one that needs permission, though the poem never says who grants it. The suggestion is that the lovers' devotion somehow earns the rest of us our continuing. "Muddle on" is the best phrase in the poem because it is so deflating. It is a homely, rather British-sounding idiom, and it promises survival without any claim to progress or wisdom. We are not saved or improved, only allowed to keep going, clumsily, and the poem seems quietly content with that.
The sound of the poem supports this modesty. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines swell from five syllables to six to seven, then drop to a final three-beat fragment, "to muddle on," which trails off the way muddling does. Soft *m* sounds drift through "forms," "time," "permitted" and "muddle," giving the ending a murmuring, unhurried feel against the sharper *s* and *t* of "insistence" and "certain."
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds in so little space. It treats love as a discipline of attention rather than a fever of feeling, and it gives that discipline a social job: love is a quiet, shared structure that holds up ordinary, muddled life. It does this with abstract words and one cheerfully humble idiom, and it asks us to decide for ourselves whether "permitted" is a gift or a joke.