Poem to First Love by Matthew Yeager

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 31, 2016   Poem to First Love   Matthew Yeager

To have been told “I love you” by you could well be, for me, the highlight of my life, the best feeling, the best peak on my feeling graph, in the way that the Chrysler building might not be the tallest building in the NY sky but is the best, the most exquisitely spired, or the way that Hank Aaron’s career home-run total is not the highest but the best, the one that signifies the purest greatness.  So improbable!  To have met you at all and then to have been told in your soft young voice so soon after meeting you: “I love you.”  And I felt the mystery of being that you, of being a you and being loved, and what I was, instantly, was someone who could be told “I love you” by someone like you.  I was, in that moment, new; you were 19; I was 22; you were impulsive; I was there in front of you, with a future that hadn’t yet been burned for fuel; I had energy; you had beauty; and your eyes were a pale blue, and they backed what you said with all they hadn’t seen, and they were the least ambitious eyes I’d known, the least calculating, and when you spoke and when they shone, perhaps you saw the feeling you caused. Perhaps you saw too that the feeling would stay.            Copyright © 2016 Matthew Yeager. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I wrote this about a year after Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s career home-run record. An idea for a Hank Aaron simile begat the poem; it lead to the memory of some fine feelings.” —Matthew Yeager   Matthew Yeager is the author of Like That (Forklift Books, 2016). He lives in New York City.   Photo credit: Mateusz Broughton Poetry by Yeager   Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) "A Love Song" by William Carlos Williams "Baseball and Writing" by Marianne Moore "Because it looked hotter that way" by Camille T. Dungy Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038