Love & the Anti-Occasion: A Look at “In the Dark Room of Too Little Time”

The ‘occasional’ poem can be a difficult endeavor for a poet, and Meghan McClure’s poem, “In the Dark Room of Too Little Time” hastens to confess in the opening lines that she will likely fall short and fail: “There is, of course, nothing new to say about love. / But let this attempt and failure be an act of love…”

The urgency in this poem’s title is what first drew me in. The idea of love as a “dark room” was so perplexing and unique to me, I had to read on to confirm my initial suspicion that this poem was indeed written about marriage or the union of love, and not about a couple on a very high-stakes date at an escape room. 

There’s a reason people reach for poetry at weddings. The occasional poem is one of the most-used romantic gestures, and more often than not meditates on common tropes of love and happiness—(think, the lyrical equivalent of a wedding cake topper). McClure takes a different direction, pointing to a longer temporality beyond the occasion itself, and one that is marked with quotidian details of domestic private life: “you will give morning coffee to one another, / which will inevitably go cold either because bed is more enticing, / or there is a fight to be had about dishes, and both are acts of love.” Like poems, love doesn’t transcend life, but lives in our bodies on earth. Love is often in the microscopic details of the anti-occasion, just as so much of a marriage can exists in one house, and often in one main room. We weather our partners in life just as we weather the seasons, and McClure warns “Winter will stretch too long, and spring will be soggy with rain, / and even summer will burn itself out as ash settles on the windowsills…”  Marriage is work, and love is often unkind—so where do we go from here?  McClure points to love as sacrifice, and through a series of imperative anaphoric lines, (statements that begin with the repeating word “let”), she foregrounds the smaller, more understated gestures: “Let it be an offering. / Let the light fall in stripes across the bed, let the bottle collect // dust for one day, let the cheap candles burn, let the forks be / mismatched and bent, let the wind pick up, let the dark settle.”

These familiar images of domestic disorder coupled with basic, mundane routine is where “love is to be had,” because where is it otherwise? And what is the urgency to embrace it?  If we wait for the right occasion or the perfect circumstances we will never see love in all its ugly, dark magnitudes. McClure implores us to course-correct our thoughts on love just as she course-corrects herself in the poem: “I take it back—dust off the bottle, pour a glass of gold / and raise it to the nothing and the everything and the who knows.” I’d argue that McClure very much has something new to say about love as she writes, “it is here in the kitchen of too much, at the table of too many, / down the hall of too narrow, in the dark room of too little time.” Just as life brings inevitable death, love carries within it the notion of inevitable loss. What else is there to say beyond the beautiful and successful last line:

“My God, it is too much and not enough. Every day.”