[In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's erotic Love Poems of Marichiko.]

The Love Poems of Marichiko represents an order of love verse strikingly different in some ways from all Rexroth's other love verse and remarkable for a man in his late sixties. Marichiko is a sequential verse narrative of sixty short verses (supposedly written by a Japanese "poetess" named Marichiko) that Rexroth claims to have translated in Japan during the 1970s. Actually, Rexroth did not translate the poems; he wrote them. I have considered at length elsewhere why Rexroth perpetrated this curious ruse. Let it suffice to say here that the poems constitute an unforgettable union of passion and poignancy, crystallized by a context of love bliss and almost unbearable forlornness. In short, the series comprises a mini-tragedy of being loved and left. Thus the deeper thematic elements in the poem provide its searing eroticism with a process of tragic realism that is a high achievement in American love verse.

The set of poems is too long to scrutinize in its entirety here, but a quotation sketch of the work will convey its flavor and some of its force:

I sit at my desk.
What can I write to you?
Sick with love,
I long to see you in the flesh.
I can write only,
'I love you. I love you. I love you.'
Love cuts through my heart
And scars my vitals.
Spasms of longing suffocate me
And will not stop.

This intensity is typical of the poem and of its dramatic desperation and anguish. Apt metaphors communicate the power of the passions running through this love. Says "Marichiko,"

Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.

With such an unquenchable appetite for love, we are subtly prepared for some strong erotic episodes, and soon get one:

You wake me,
Part my thighs, and kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world…

in which the cunnilingual sex is partly sublimated by an apocalyptic content suggesting through poetic license the extremity of passion of this love experience. A far sharper, almost terrifying sensuality emerges some poems later:

I scream as you bite
My nipples, and orgasm
Drains my body, as if I
Had been cut in two.

This love is so obsessive and overwhelming to "Marichiko" that even daytime, the major phase of our conscious lives and strivings, is subordinated to night and dreams of love and lover:

Because I dream
Of you every night,
My lonely days
Are only dreams.

One could notice here how much effect Rexroth is getting out of concise, spare diction, short verse lines, and almost no metaphors, qualities found in some of his best love and nature poems. In the "Marichiko" poems, these traits are so condensed, so tautened as to lead through a paradoxical process of inversion to a considerable expansiveness of emotion and reference. There are just a few words and two to two-and-a-half foot verse lines, but the words are chosen with utter precision of meaning and emotion to make a powerful impact. The verse sentences of this series poem, chiseled to quintessential expression, embody a core of realized experience, evoking again Rexroth's mystical immanence of "the holiness of the real."

The poem sequence achieves a witty grammatical and semantic bliss that is as moving as it is illusionary (and it is both) in #20:

Who is there? Me.
Me who? I am me. You are you.
You take my pronoun,
And we are us.

This pronomial "jeu d'esprit" will late in the sequence imply bitter irony for the narrator, who, in merging herself with her beloved, will lose herself disastrously, for, when "us" dissolves, "me" and "I" seem, so violently disunited, selfless and virtually dead.

Relations subtly, mysteriously change, and by #38, after a few quiet hints in two or three preceding poems, we get this:

I waited all night.
By midnight I was on fire.
In the dawn, hoping
To find a dream of you,
I laid my weary head
On my folded arms,
But the songs of the waking
Birds tormented me.

which is followed five poems later by

… Crickets sing all night in the pine tree.
At midnight the temple bell rings,
Wild geese cry overhead
Nothing else.

and

… My hollow eyes and gaunt cheeks
Are your fault.

Clearly, another, sinister phase of the relationship has evolved. Little reason is given for its occurrence ("Our love was dimmed by / Forces which came from without,") we are told, but that explanation is vague at best, and leads us to think that the cause of the end of love is less important than its occurrence, which (for some people) is inevitable, like the succession of the seasons, or death.

The final poems in the sequence are as fraught with grief, misery and bitterness as the earlier ones were radiant with joy and ecstasy:

… My heart flares with this agony.
Do you understand?
My life is going out.
Do you understand?
My life.

The final poem in the sequence implies death of life for the woman, in these concluding lines:

I hate the sight of coming day
Since that morning when
Your insensitive gaze turned me to ice
Like the pale moon in the dawn.

Thus the series does not end sensationally, on a flourish of melodrama or violence. Rather, it ends the way such matters often enough end in life, in rejection, estrangement, bitterness, one's desire to live ebbing into a darkening grayness. "Chilled through, I wake up with the first light," she says in the same poem. Life is now monotonal, dominated by the dark side of the moon of love that shone lustrously earlier in the poem sequence.

One could possibly squeeze a moral from the "Marichiko" poems, but that would falsify the pith ofthis verse, for the real integrity of the sequence (Rexroth's most coherent, tight-knit one) does not arise from some facile, causal explanation or moral judgment. Rather, like the Scandinavian sagas in which blood feuds erupt from either mysterious or trivial causes and move relentlessly towards doom like Fall towards Winter, the "Marichiko" poems suggest that love begins, grows, wanes and sometimes ends. One can't always explain it, love can be like that. It does end, and that is as much a part of the actual trajectory of life (if less palatable to our basic ideals or fantasies) as unending love or marital fidelity. Aside from such bony realism, the "Marichiko" poems are remarkable for so utterly blending romance and realism that the extremities of ecstatic love become inextricably part of the same world of experience as the acrid horror of abandonment. They are especially remarkable, though, for being so free of moral pronouncement and for the narrative they frame, which allows Rexroth's capacity for an impersonal poetics even more scope than do most of his love lyrics.