Fanny Howe's "February 16" sets itself up as a vocabulary lesson, then lets the vocabulary run wild. Five verbs arrive in order (to eat, to sleep, to want, to kill, to love), each announced with a teacher's flat confidence: "The first word is, of course." Together they sketch the wiring of a human being, from the infant's first demands to the adult's hardest one. The central idea lands in the final lines. Love is not a separate, softer thing but the other four drives rearranged and put to work.
Each section behaves like a dictionary entry that has lost its manners. The poem opens with a verb, then chases it through other languages, synonyms and sheer sound. "To Eat - manger, or The Manger" is a double pun, since the French verb for eating also sits inside the English word for a baby's crib. The sentence then piles up verbs, from "masticate" and "devour" to "rob-from-the-landscape". The section ends with "milk is / to eat what water is to bleed---mmmmmmm". That last sound is not a word at all but the noise of feeding. Language keeps collapsing into baby-noise like this: "do-do," "wah!", "yo-yo-yo-yo," "la-la." The poem suggests that words begin in the body before they mean anything.
The middle sections darken. Sleep is partly comfort ("rock / in God") but also "drown the brain, empty the wrists," and "say goodbye world," so it shades toward death. Fairy tales get crushed together into "stilskin" and "threeblind / -mice," as if dreams were a blender for nursery stories. Want is built on a French verb, voler, which means both "to fly" and "to steal." The poem seems to hear both meanings, since "to lay hands up in greed" sits beside "to fall without wings is to want to fly." Its gloss of the French phrase turns desire into absence: "I am missing, myself, / of you." Wanting here is a loss of self, not a possession.
Killing is the most sonically violent section. The hard k-sounds clatter ("kullen, cool, keel, curl, call, cull, crack-on-the-skull"), and the words slide from harmless ("cool," "curl") to brutal without changing gear. Then the tone turns to nursery rhyme: "mad at mama, mad at dad," "do em in, do em out," "wormies in der snout." The mock-German baby talk makes the violence funny and unsettling at once. Howe refuses to separate a toddler's tantrum from the wish to destroy.
Love gets the strangest word-chain: "lubere, amor, leaf, amiable, amazing grace, amazon / and ammunition." The "am-" syllable carries tenderness straight into weaponry. The four earlier verbs are then shuffled line by line, like a combination lock turning, and none of the orders settles. The answer, when it comes, is surprisingly plain: "to hug your luggage all the way / to the country / in a big blizzard / to earn some bread / to feed the one / you is equal to." Love is effortful and cold, a matter of carrying things and earning a living. It also closes the circle, because the poem began with eating and ends with feeding someone else. The slightly wrong grammar of "you is equal to" also matters. "Equal to" echoes the "equals" just before it, and it can also mean "capable of," as in being equal to a task. Judging by the wording, love here means being up to the job of another person's hunger.
The form is free verse with no steady meter. The rhythm comes from long breathless lists broken by short, hammered syllables, and rhyme appears only when the speaker regresses to childhood ("do em out / snout"). The title reads like a diary date, which gives the whole piece the feel of an ordinary day's thinking.
The poem matters for how much it fits into so little space. It gives a definition of love that no greeting card would print, one made of appetite, anger and unglamorous labour. It also shows that our most abstract words are rooted in mouths, hands and tantrums. Love is what the poem proposes as a way to carry all of those drives without being ruined by them.