Love, in J.J. Loe's "Vagaries of Love," does not arrive as comfort. It arrives as a collapse. The opening lines break mid-phrase, "announced in down / falls the moon", so that "downfall" flickers inside the syntax before the moon itself drops. The slash that cuts the first line in two works like a hesitation or a stumble, and the poem keeps stumbling on purpose. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The rhythm comes from fragments, abrupt stops, and one line left alone like a verdict: "and entropy." After "hemmed by crews of thieves," that short line reads as the final cost. Whatever is loved is being stolen, and at the same time it is slowly running down.
The second movement moves indoors, into rooms stripped of colour. "White-washed vistas" and "sheets of chlorine" belong to the vocabulary of bleach and laboratories, not candlelight. Sleepers "hold in the solution," a phrase that can mean bodies suspended in liquid or lovers waiting for an answer. Then comes the poem's most unsettling verb, "rending." To rend is to tear, yet here it joins "arm with arm / leg with leg." Desire and violence share one word. The ambiguity carries into "man assumes woman / woman / man", where identities swap or merge "with unerring labor." Labor might suggest plain effort, or perhaps the pains of birth. Either way, intimacy is described as work done flawlessly, almost mechanically, which is an odd and chilly way to picture love.
The next stanza changes how the poem looks on the page. "Every wrong act" is "placed in / an imaginary circle," and the short lines then narrow like the thing they describe: "a vessel / or spine / narrowing at the neck." The shape that emerges is a bottle or a flower, and the poem confirms it with "a green effacing / stem forming / a rosy spur." Guilt is gathered up, and something green grows over it. "Effacing" means erasing, but the poem never says whether this is forgiveness or a cover-up. "Spur" is just as double-edged, since it can be a thorn or something that goads. The beautiful and the sharp grow from the same stem.
The closing stanzas turn the poem's contradictions into a kind of music. "Comic our tragic lips / poison and sing" puts the two masks of drama together and gives the lips two opposite jobs at once. A kiss and a curse, a song and a toxin, come from the same mouth. The "night's / vagrant landscapes" then echo the title, since "vagaries" and "vagrant" both carry the idea of wandering. Love here has no fixed address. The sound thickens as well: "Scattered," "sickle," "scorpions" hiss and click together. The sickle is a harvest tool, and a scorpion's raised tail curves like its blade, so the image makes the harvest itself venomous. Wheat falls, and what reaps it is a sting.
The poem ends quietly, which makes it more disquieting. The moon that fell in the first stanza returns as "a span of moonlight / upon the half-lit door." Nothing falls now. The light stretches across a threshold that is neither open nor shut, neither dark nor lit.
That refusal to settle is what gives the poem its force. Loe never says love is good or bad. Instead, the poem keeps the tenderness and the menace in the same frame and makes the reader hold both. Its words do double duty ("solution," "rending," "spur," "labor"), and its line breaks create meanings the sentences alone would not. For a student, it is a useful example of how a poem can say something true about love without ever stating it directly.