Two men kissed her that year, and the third never did

This is a poem of eight lines. It was printed in 1915 in a slim book by an American woman named Sara Teasdale.

It has a speaker, who is a woman, and it has three men. It covers one year.

The men have names borrowed from very old love poetry, the names poets gave shepherds when they wanted to write about courting without naming anybody real. Strephon, Robin, Colin.

In the spring, Strephon kissed her. In the fall, Robin did.

Both of those kisses happened. She gives each of them a single line and moves on.

Colin never kissed her at all. He looked at her, and that is everything he did.

She does not tell you what happened next. She tells you which of the three she cannot put down.

Look at the word "only." Do not skim past it.

She says it the way you and I say it, to shrink a thing before anybody else can. He only looked, it was only a feeling, it is only something I think about in the car.

Then look where the poem goes from here. By its end, the two kisses that actually happened are behind her, and the thing that only happened is the one that stays.

Now listen to me.

We are told, constantly, that a want only counts if it has been acted on. If nobody kissed anybody, if nothing was said, if it never got a name, then it was nothing, and a grown woman should have the sense to let nothing go.

This poem says the opposite. It says the kiss that never happened is the one with weight.

And never kissed at all: I need you to hear where she put that line. Last, where the stanza lands, as if the absence were the thing worth ending on.

Count the lines, too. The two men who kissed her get one line each, and the man who did nothing gets two.

She will not pretend it was nothing, and she does not ask permission to still feel it. She simply sets it down, in the plainest words she has.

And she is not a girl mourning one summer. She has had a spring and a fall, two men, a full turn of the year, and she is old enough to know the difference between what was pleasant and what was real.

You know what you are carrying. Maybe it has a face and maybe it does not, maybe it is a person who looked at you once across a room, maybe it is a life you looked at and never touched.

It is not nothing because it did not happen. It may be the truest thing in the house.

This poem is a hundred and eleven years old. It fits on the back of a grocery receipt, and almost nobody has read it.

Today. Copy these four lines by hand, in pen, slowly enough that your writing stays neat. Then underneath, write one line about the thing you have been calling "only." Do not explain it. Do not show it to anyone.

In March of the year I could not write, I copied a sentence of Cranford onto a page by itself. Underneath it I put two words: "Not yet."

I did not mean the book. I did not know what I meant.

I looked at those two words for a long time before I closed the notebook. They were the first thing in months I had written down and not crossed out.