Neil Myers gives this poem no name, only three asterisks, and the choice suits it. It reads like a thought caught halfway through, or torn from a longer silence. Its subject is how love and its opposite grow from a single injury. Its central claim, held back until the last line, is blunt: "love must carry / its own abuse."
The opening sets out the terms. "love hate" sit side by side with no comma and no "and", so they almost fuse into one compound word. The next lines explain why: they "begin from the same / dismay." They are twins born of one bewilderment, not opposites. Then the scale jumps: "a breath of solitude / the countries / that fall apart." The poem never says how a single breath connects to whole countries, and the gap seems deliberate. One reading is that a private breakup and a national collapse feel alike from the inside. Another is that loneliness is the small unit from which larger ruptures are built. Both are inferences, since the poem names no particular place or event.
The second stanza turns the idea darker. "A wanton breaking / of pairs" refers most obviously to lovers, though the word could stretch to anything once matched. "Wanton" is a loaded choice. It means reckless and cruel, but it also suggests unrestrained desire, so the breaking is destructive and hungry at once. Then comes the strangest proposal in the poem: "we should fall / further / in the sweet act / of lesion." The word "further" sits alone on its line, so the reader drops down the page with it. "Lesion" is clinical, a word for damaged tissue, and placed beside "sweet act" it produces the poem's central paradox, injury as intimacy. The verb matters too. It is "we should fall", not "we fall", which makes it sound like advice, almost a dare.
The final stanza, the longest, shifts to the body, and the grammar frays. "The fingers loosening / the legs awake / moving / the eyes / bigger than nights / nipples chest." There are almost no complete clauses here, only glimpses, like a camera panning across a bed. Loosening fingers could mean a lover's touch relaxing or someone letting go. "Moving" hangs between lines, so it can describe the legs or the feeling of being moved. "Eyes bigger than nights" is a comparison that doesn't quite compute, and that is its effect: eyes so wide in the dark that they overflow it, from desire, fear or both. "Nipples chest" jams two nouns together without punctuation, as if the language itself were out of breath. The purpose of all this appears two lines later: "a last clearing / of tedious loss." A clearing is an opening in a wood, but also a clearing of debts or of the throat. "Tedious" deflates grand grief into something repetitive and dull, the kind of loss that keeps coming back and has to be cleared out again.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme, no capitals and no punctuation. The short lines of two or three stresses create the pauses commas would normally supply. The stanzas run six, six and eleven lines, so the poem swells as it nears its confession. Sound quietly ties the ends together. The l of "love", "lesion", "loosening", "legs" and "loss" runs through it like a thread, and the poem closes on "love" again. The verbs also form a family of dissolution: "fall apart", "fall further", "breaking", "loosening".
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to console. It never says love redeems the damage or that hate wins. After a stanza of fragments, the last two lines arrive in one firm declarative sentence, and the force of "must" is unmistakable. The wording stays open, though. "Carry" can mean to endure a burden or to contain it, and "its own" makes the abuse love's property rather than something done to it from outside. The poem leaves the reader to decide whether that is a tragedy or simply an honest account of how closeness works.