To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm. It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced. Marge Piercy
About This Quote

To Have Without Holding is a poem about how much it hurts to love another person without holding on. The speaker in this poem describes how things feel like they are made of wet plaster, or blunt knives. Then, he describes how he feels like he is cutting himself, and then stabbing himself with sharp knives. He says that this happens over and over again, and that he can't help but feel this way.

He questions whether or not it's the right thing to do, but then reveals that his lover is not even in the bed with him. He also says that he is killing himself by loving another person so freely, because the hurting only gets worse every time. But he says he will continue to love so freely because he loves so much.

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  1. To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm....
  2. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
  3. Thinking about tracking.. .. Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.
  4. Subject that got people aroused . was Who Owns America? . <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>They had a chart going . filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions . <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>. and...
  5. I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
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