Who Are You And Whom Do You Love? by Bhanu Kapil

I first read Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers in college and I was absolutely enthralled. This was poetry I had never seen before, formless and unstructured. It struck me in a way I couldn’t explain, and changed how I wrote poetry.

A month from now. A week from now. Tomorrow. When he goes. The going.
I’ll make crepes, walk by the river with the dog, float candles in a pudding
basin; the usual. He’s gone. Between our bodies: the sun at 5 a.m.; fifty-seven
Herefords, and a Brahma bull that broke the river fence; four and a
half thousand hummingbirds; a dying man; a man who is about to knock
on the door of a woman with black eyes, to tell her that he loves her; the
woman herself, who is drawing a bath. She can’t hear the door above the
water. And her eyes aren’t really black. They’re brown. She lights a match.

Floating candles. The incommensurable distance. I forgot to memorize
his face.

https://www.best-poems.net/bhanu-kapil/who-are-you-and-whom-do-you-love.html