After Christian Barter’s “Can You”

Hi everyone!
What caught my eye in this poem was the second line when the speaker says he’s “Addicted to the beginnings of relationships” and I found this to be extremely relatable. Dating someone for the first time is exciting; everything is new and fun and light. He prefaces this with “Can you love the dawn and hate the day?” I think the comparison is great because dawn is a prime example of beginning. He then compares new light of day to his first sighting of a woman named Catherine–which I immediately associated with Wuthering Heights although I don’t believe it has anything to do with the poem. The speaker tells readers of the promising look she gave him “before the promises.” The sounds in this poem are very quiet. When the speaker says “[…] still stuck with sweetness to her face in my notebook of pre-day ecstasies” it is clear he spent a lot of time writing about the woman before they were together, and the “s” sounds make the line dream-like. The last five lines of the poem are more dense with imagery than the beginning. There are a lot of “-ing” words in these lines such as “seeping,” “casting,” “opening,” “ending,” and “inkling.” These words give the end of the poem a feeling of floating or slowly drifting, and I believe Barter wanted this effect because he writes about the world opening. The speaker is waiting for love to come to him.
Arianna