A plain title like "Love Poem" promises something familiar, but Nelson Barr's seven short lines are anything but. A lover's body is made of steel and glass, a kiss becomes a flight over rooftops, and devotion ends in crucifixion. The poem is about love as surrender, a love so complete that the speaker asks to be pinned in place. Its central idea is that tenderness and violence, hardness and softness, are partners here rather than opposites.
The opening command, "comb fragility from your hair," is a strange one. Fragility is treated like a tangle that can be drawn out strand by strand. The speaker wants the beloved rid of weakness, and what he sees is armour: "white steel breasts." White suggests skin and purity, while steel suggests cold strength, so she seems part statue, part machine. She also "break[s] the contours / of silvered glass." Silvered glass is a mirror, so her body either shatters the reflection or outshines it. Notice that the line ends on "contours," as if the line itself had been broken off mid-thought. The form quietly acts out what the words describe.
With "Let your mouth move me over rooftops of raininfinitely," the poem changes gear. The speaker stops giving orders and asks permission. "Move" works twice, meaning both to carry him physically and to stir him emotionally. The fused word "raininfinitely" is the poem's boldest stroke. Rain and infinitely are jammed together without a space, so the reader cannot pause, and the endlessness is felt in the reading. If you look closely, "finite" is hidden inside the word as well, which hints at a limit within the endless. This is also the longest line, and it spills forward like water. The image is dreamlike: a city of wet roofs seen from above, weightless and slippery. Then comes "tongue of rose," where the tongue becomes a petal, soft and perfumed. The beloved was steel a moment ago and is now a flower, and the poem does not explain the change.
The final movement is the sharpest. "nail me" is broken off so abruptly that the speaker hangs for a beat before we learn where. The answer is "a cross of down." Crucifixion brings sacrifice and religious weight into an erotic poem, but the cross is made of feathers, or perhaps bedding, so the suffering is cushioned. "Down" also means the direction of falling, which suits a poem about giving oneself up. There is a paradox in the grammar too. The speaker, who earlier said "Let," now returns to the imperative and commands his own undoing. He surrenders by giving the order.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its line lengths swing from the long "rooftops" line to the two-beat "nail me." The slashes at the ends of three lines divide the poem into three movements, from looking to moving to being fixed in place. The materials soften as it goes, from steel and glass, to rain and rose, to down. Even the sound follows this path. The first lines are full of hard consonants (comb, break, contours, glass), and the middle slides into the liquid r and n of "rooftops of raininfinitely, tongue of rose." The one hard word left at the end, "nail," is surrounded by softness.
The poem is worth reading because it takes the oldest props of love poetry, the mirror, the rose and the martyrdom of the lover, and makes them strange. The flat title works almost as deadpan humour against the extravagant imagery. Nothing in the text tells us who "you" is, and that anonymity keeps attention on the feeling itself. Love here exalts and wounds in the same breath, and the poem makes both feel like pleasure.