I just love all the lines in this poem about resisting outdated rules, and the failure of traditional systems for queer folks:

"The rules break like a thermometer" "the maps they gave us were out of date" "plucked and fingered by women outside the law." (bonus for that lovely innuendo)

This poem reminds me a lot of one of Burt's own poems that I love, "Taboos at Twelve", which ends with the lines "if I could break that rule / then I could break any rule, / so the rules I follow must all be rules I chose."

If the rules of our lives are, at best, meant to limit our own relationship with ourselves and, at worst, justify our mistreatment, then why would we choose them? If the maps do not point us in a direction we wish to go, then we will find our own way.

The visual structure of this poem is so immediately striking: lines and lines with no stanza breaks, each line only a few words long. On the page it draws the eye down and down, tumbling towards the end, and I wonder why Schuyler chose to break his lines that way.

"You know, yes / and I know, / no, you are / so with me / when apart, I" -- This section is just an example of how the line breaks, combined with all the commas, em dashes, and colons break up longer thoughts and sentences and give it an almost stumbling, fluttering quality.

Burt asks at the beginning of her essay how limerence changes our sense of time and I think it does often feel like a series of bursts of emotions, of moments of connection strung together like beads on a line--at least, that's the sense I get from this poem.

I just love the energy of this poem. The progression from tree to "a piece of air with lightning in it" is a journey from something rooted and fixed to something "more free, even than that." That series of transformations, of shedding pieces to become something instant and striking and true is the journey Burt describes in their accompanying essay, describing how Carol is one thing in the public world and a different thing in private. This is one I'll probably be coming back to a lot.

"So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut?"

I love this punch of an opening line that echoes to now and the ways there are many who love queer culture but hate queer people and movements. Burt describes the poem as taking place in a "not-quite-liberated Manhattan" where they "speak honestly to oneself but in hints to others" -- as parts of queer culture find their way into the mainstream there are ways that we are able to speak and live more freely, but many other ways that those hints and codes have shifted or new ones have been necessarily created.