Page 195

The page reduces love to a declaration joined to renunciation: the feeling remains, but action is withdrawn.

Its bluntness is what gives it weight. The poem turns restraint itself into the emotional event.

Five spare lines title themselves 'With you or not' and then deliver a vow of inaction: 'I love you / And I will never / do a thing / about it.' The declaration and its renunciation are fused into one breath, so love becomes a settled fact held deliberately apart from any act. The lineation isolates 'about it' as a quiet shrug, turning restraint - not longing - into the poem's actual event.