Crush

In the 7th grade, I played flute in the school band. I was slightly above average, certainly not first chair. That’s how our band director organized us; first chair meant you were expected to help out your section-mates, pick up the music fastest (practice more, in other words) and perform solos when your instrument was called for.

I had a crush on the boy who was first chair trumpet.

He wasn’t particularly cute, certainly not carrying any more drama or depth than any other 13-year-old boy. He had a bowl-cut head of hair streaked with white blond, silver-rimmed glasses, and an obnoxious laugh.

But he could play the trumpet.

When he raised that instrument to his lips, he shone. The light reflected off that polished brass and the sound that came out promised secret rooms inside him, hints of the complex self he himself might never even know about.

He wasn’t Louis Armstrong, of course. He was just a 13-year-old boy who played trumpet better than anyone else in his class, and knew it. He wasn’t awkward when he played, or conscious of his body or, really, of anyone or anything else. And though I’d never noticed him much before he stood up to play his solo in October of that 7th grade year, I was, suddenly, smitten.

I crush easily. I sense some hidden angle in a person and I’m gone. But it’s not about appearance—a parade of Brad Pitt and George Clooney look-alikes would entertain me, but produce no crushes. My easily-won, temporary love—for that’s what it is—blossoms under the conditions of performance.

So imagine you love poetry as I do, that it is the closest to spirituality or transcendence you ever feel, that it drops into your center like a stone into a pond and the ripples trace the most vital patterns you will ever know. And imagine you’ve read someone’s poetry and it makes the patterns you didn’t know you needed. And this, of course, is art, is a performance of words. Wouldn’t you fall in love?

Then add—oh such a delicate equation—a person whose conversation and body language and expressions remind you of that art you love, like the little whiffs of cologne a body gives off when it moves to put on a coat or wave to a friend. Imagine a poetry reading, and the person responsible for that art performing it even more directly, making it even better than it was when you first met it, solitary, on the page.

That, for me, is the ultimate crush: the poetry crush. Mark Strand, sexy and witty in person, definitely still the man I can imagine “romp[ing] with joy in the bookish dark.” James Galvin, who wooed me with lines like, “The slender lodgepole pines/Stand so close together/You couldn’t walk through them/In your body,” before I ever met him and became his student. And Jean Valentine, for “Under our radiant sleep they were bearing us all night long,” and the quiet but real magic of her voice when she read her poems in a crowded room in Washington, D.C.

My poetry crushes are true loves—I really do love them, these poets. And I don’t know how else to feel my love but in my body, too, wanting to both kiss the maker and taste the words, the bells ringing under my sternum and the loosened rubber bands of my leg muscles.

This is who I am: I get crushes. I fall in love with poets, including those I will never meet (James Wright, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale…). Sometimes those poets’ books watch me while I sleep. That I am happily and faithfully married to the funniest, kindest, most talented writer in the world doesn’t mean I’m lying when I say, “I love this poet.”

I love you, my poetry crushes. Yes, you.

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This essay was written by Katherine Riegel. Not only is she the best poet I know--I have a wicked crush on her--but she is the author of Castaway.