As A Possible Lover - Analysis

Learning love by rehearsing its opposite

Baraka’s poem reads like a lesson carried out in private: the speaker is training for intimacy by practicing what intimacy is not. The repeated verb practices frames the whole piece as habit, discipline, almost a daily regimen. But what’s being practiced is first silence and then loneliness—states that protect the self, even as they starve it. The central claim feels stark: as a possible lover, the speaker can only approach love through withholding, because certainty and possession are illusions he has learned to distrust.

Silence that moves like weather

Silence isn’t presented as calm or empty; it’s kinetic, like air. The phrase the way of wind followed by bursting makes quietness paradoxically forceful, something that arrives in gusts. The time setting—Cold morning / to night—stretches that silence across a whole day, as if this is the climate the speaker lives inside. And the couple’s movement is slowed to a crawl: we go so / slowly, without / thought / to ourselves. That last detail matters: the poem suggests a self-escape. Instead of two people turning toward each other, the motion is away from self-knowledge, away from the kind of reflection that might require commitment.

The parenthetical turn: certainty breaks down

The poem’s emotional hinge is the long aside that begins (Enough / to have thought / tonight. Suddenly the speaker admits what the earlier drifting tried to avoid: thought returns at night, and it brings the recognition that nothing / finishes. He can’t land the feeling, can’t complete the sentence of the relationship. In that space the poem makes its hardest statement: What / you are, will have / no certainty. The beloved (or the idea of the beloved) becomes unfixed—no stable definition, or / end. Yet there’s also a tender, pleading vision: That you will / stay, where you are, described as a human gentle wisp / of life. The tone softens into awe—Ah…—but it’s an awe that keeps the other person airy, almost untouchable. The speaker wants presence without the demands of solidity.

Loneliness as virtue, not accident

After that breathy Ah…, the poem snaps back to the language of practice: practices / loneliness, / as a virtue. Loneliness is moralized, turned into something admirable—self-control, self-sufficiency, even purity. But Baraka undercuts that claim immediately by calling the motive a single / specious need. Specious means plausible but false: the need sounds convincing, yet it’s a cover story. This is the poem’s key tension: the speaker calls loneliness a virtue while exposing it as a strategy, a defense that masquerades as principle.

Keeping what was never had

The closing lines sharpen the contradiction into a cruelly precise paradox: to keep / what you have / never really / had. Possession is revealed as fantasy. The speaker’s desire isn’t simply to love someone; it’s to preserve an imagined ownership of them, an ownership that never existed in reality. Read this way, the earlier wish—That you will / stay—is less a blessing than a form of containment: keep the beloved suspended as a wisp, never fully entering the messy world where love can be tested, changed, or lost.

A sharp question the poem refuses to settle

If nothing / finishes, is the speaker’s loneliness a tragic realism—or a refusal to risk being finished, defined, and therefore vulnerable? The poem keeps both possibilities alive. It lets tenderness flare, then immediately returns to discipline, as if the only safe way to be a lover is to remain merely possible.