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SAMPLE
POEMS FROM MADLY IN LOVE |
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MADLY IN LOVE
For Ruth Stone
Late one summer night he tore through
her latched screen door, his trousers
in his hand, and declared his love.
Then he lay down on the rug and screamed.
He was obliging when she asked him to leave
and hiked from Goshen twenty miles
across the Brandon Gap in his underwear.
At six AM, casually as if he carried
a sack of breakfast bagels, he rang
our bell, trousers still in hand.
Three days later he committed himself.
He was a librarian, a sensible man.
As a child it mystified me.
Now I think despair could make me
walk twenty miles in my underwear.
I could lie down half-naked and wail
for an audience for my articulate loins.
I've screamed--haven't you?--even though
screaming means no one will listen.
And he was a librarian--I imagine him
knowing all the proper places for books
and for the lover in the stacks
who wasn't there when he clicked off
the fluorescent lights and drove
into mountains where the Milky Way's
silk sash billowed above him
and crickets sang out crazy excitement
as he stood on the dirt road with mountains
rising over him, wonderful, dark,
breathing desire. He saw her lighted
by a lamp and the fire, reading.
And for a moment, before he broke
through the obstructing screen,
liberating to the inside
mosquitoes and winking fireflies,
he thought she'd reply.
THE BATH
I'm taking a bath thirty-six years, seven
months,
and three days after my birth.
Outside I hear the city of Madison hum out
its dumb question, Hu-u-uh? One long,
constant note.
No sirens or screams, no tornado warning, no
people
laughing on the street because it's spring,
nothing like that.
Inside the bathwater clicks or plinks,
clearing its throat or breathing regularly,
saying please, please, please, please,
please,
ditto, and ditto again, like that, under
its breath,
so you just make out its loneliness. I hear
these things
because I'm asking, Am I inside my body? Am
I a work of art?
and prop myself up, so one calf and ankle
and foot,
then the other, float. So one forearm and
wrist and hand,
then the other, float. Skin in warm water is
rosy.
Breasts float like water lilies.
I am a woman who's not given birth, soaking
the tension
out of my back, alone in the bath, seeing if
I can
objectify myself while my heart goes out to
some you,
out through the fogged window, sighing like
the body
of water--warm, elusive--out over the dumb
groan of city
and the slushy, melting lakes streaked with
those signs
of both solitude and society: lights of
streets, windows, cars.
This is not what we call longing, yearning,
desire, horniness.
This is not a memory of someone who admired
my breasts
or with touch transported me inside myself.
Can you imagine something else? Not the
image of lovers
in the mind of a woman alone in the bath,
speaking to the
blankness of bathroom walls or the blankness
of the page.
Imagine now I can't see my face, only these
floating hands,
heels hooked on the bathtub's rim, these
strange, weighted
limbs, unfamiliar a moment, though little
changed in years,
as if I were newborn and had no words and no
past,
no way to identify this--this what?--this
thing lying in water,
trying to unwind, a little bitter to be
alone in her body,
questioning, pleading, trying to please, and
unable to exit
her conversation with you or the pleasure of
these words
forming out of water, the pleasure of being
in the bath.
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