Alan Dugan’s off-putting rhythm and his messianic carpentry metaphor makes love a labor of suffering and still finds room for a partner. I enjoy the way he manages to build a love poem out of his self-obsession and his undirected fury… even though I don’t experience love that way, I recognize the power of the poem when it worms its way into my thinking for Valentine’s Day. I found the poem on

Slate’s VDAY poetry celebration

, which gathers strange and curious poems that go beyond the Neruda and Rumi fare that normally pester us during the season of love.

Nothing is plumb, level or square: the studs are bowed, the joists are shaky by nature, no piece fits any other piece without a gap or pinch, and bent nails dance all over the surfacing like maggots. By Christ I am no carpenter. I built the roof for myself, the walls for myself, the floors for myself, and got hung up in it myself. I danced with a purple thumb at this house-warming, drunk with my prime whiskey: rage. Oh, I spat rage’s nails into the frame-up of my work: it held. It settled plumb, level, solid, square and true for that great moment. Then it screamed and went on through, skewing as wrong the other way. God damned it. This is hell, but I planned it, I sawed it, I nailed it, and I will live in it until it kills me. I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece but I can’t do everything myself. I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife.