Elin Paulson's poem is built almost entirely from one phrase, "i remember," repeated until it starts to feel like a pulse. Each repetition opens a new snapshot of a relationship: a first night, a riverbank, a hillside, a room, a failed garden. Then, in the last two lines, the poem lets in what the list has been circling: "& the hurt." It is about how a happy past can't be kept separate from the pain that came with it, and the poem's central idea is that memory holds both at once, without explaining either.
I know nothing reliable about Paulson, so everything here comes from the page. The poem is dated 8/20/62, and its title, "With Love Still 2," suggests it belongs to a numbered series. That is only an inference from the title, but the word "still" fits a speaker who is carrying love forward rather than closing the book on it.
The form does much of the work. There is no rhyme, no capital letters and almost no punctuation. The slashes act as breaths or small cuts, and the lines break in the middle of thoughts: "when / the painting," "i / remember," "garden of / marijuana." The effect is memory arriving faster than it can be tidied. The ampersands and the casual spelling of "nite" keep the voice close and unguarded, like a letter never revised.
The imagery moves between the wild and the tender. In the first memory, "the painting roared off the wall," a startling image that makes the room itself come alive. "willie in red" then "whirled around the little black room / like mad angel." The red against the black, and the oddly paired "mad angel," give the night a sense of holiness and recklessness together. The room is "little," so all this energy is packed into a small space, which makes the scene feel both intimate and slightly dangerous.
The forsythias carry the poem's frankest image. They appear "in hair and crotch and hand," and the flowers treat the whole body alike, with no embarrassment or ranking. If the date is read as August, which is an assumption, there is a further sadness. Forsythias bloom in early spring, so the speaker is looking back across a whole season to a moment that has already gone by.
Against all this soaring, two small details keep the poem honest. One is the stone "with a face which i still have." It is the only thing in the poem that survives into the present, and its "still" echoes the title. Love has become an object that can be held, though it is blank and unchanging. The other is "our garden of / marijuana which didn't grow well." That line is funny and a little deflating, and it admits that not everything the couple tried together worked. The speaker doesn't dress it up. The honesty makes the surrounding warmth easier to trust.
The final sentence shifts the poem. Until then the speaker has recalled scenes, and only "your room" hints at the other person. Now "you" takes over, described in a rush of adjectives: "warm gentle impatient beautiful." "Impatient" sits quietly among the praise and may already point toward the ending. Then comes the most striking phrase: "wanting to make my happy only." Turning "happy" into a noun, "my happy," sounds childlike and raw, as if the speaker is reaching for a word that grammar doesn't allow. "Only" hangs at the end of its line, so it can mean "wanting only to make me happy," but it also seems to wait for what follows. What follows is "& the hurt," tacked on with an ampersand like an afterthought, and the poem simply stops. The hurt is never explained, and we are not told whose it was or how it came. Leaving it unexplained is what makes it feel real.
The poem matters because it avoids the usual shapes of a love poem. It doesn't mourn grandly, and it doesn't blame. It lists, laughs a little, and lets the pain come in last and unexplained. Its closing words seem to say that the speaker's love is still there, and so is the hurt, and the poem won't give up either one to make the other easier to bear.