--When the Young Husband--
When the young husband picked up his friend's pretty wife
in the taxi one block from her townhouse for their
first lunch together, in a hotel dining room
with a room key in his pocket,
midtown traffic gridlocked and was abruptly still.
For one moment before Klaxons started honking,
a prophetic voice spoke in his mind's ear despite
his pulse's erotic thudding:
"The misery you undertake this afternoon
will accompany you to the ends of your lives.
She knew what she did, when she agreed to this lunch,
although she will not admit it;
and you've constructed your playlet a thousand times:
cocktails, an omelet, wine; the revelation
of a room key; the elevator rising as
the penis elevates; the skin
flushed, the door fumbled at, the handbag dropped;
the first
kiss with open mouths, nakedness, swoon, thrust-and-catch;
endorphins followed by endearments; a brief nap;
another fit, restoration
of clothes, arrangements for another encounter,
the taxi back, and the furtive kiss of good-bye.
Then, by turn: tears, treachery, anger, betrayal;
marriages and houses destroyed;
small children abandoned and inconsolable,
their foursquare estates disestablished forever;
the unreadable advocates; the wretchedness
of passion outworn; anguished nights
sleepless in a bare room; whiskey, meth, cocaine; new
love, essayed in loneliness with miserable
strangers, that comforts nothing but skin; hours with
sons
and daughters studious always
to maintain distrust; the daily desire to die
and the daily agony of the requirement
to survive, until only the quarrel endures."
Prophecy stopped; traffic started.
--The Wedding Couple--
Fifteen years ago his heart
infarcted and he stopped smoking.
At eighty he trembled
like a birch but remained vigorous
and acute.
When they married,
fifty years ago, I was twelve.
I observed the white lace
veil, the mumbling preacher, and the flowers
of parlor silence
and ordinary absurdity; but
I thought I stood outside
the parlor.
For two years she dwindled
by small strokes
into a mannequin--speechless almost, almost
unmoving, eyes open
and blinking, fitful in perception--
but a mannequin that suffered
shame when it stained the bed sheet.
Slowly, shaking with purpose,
he carried her to the bathroom,
undressed and washed her,
dressed her in clean clothes, and carried her back
to CNN and bed. "All
you need is love," sang John and Paul:
He touched her shoulder; her eyes
caressed him like a bride's bold eyes.
--The Poem--
It discovers by night
what the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a quiet row of machines.
Who knows
what it is thinking?
--Ardor--
Nursing her I felt alive
in the animal moment,
scenting the predator.
Her death was the worst thing
that could happen,
and caring for her was best.
After she died I screamed,
upsetting the depressed dog
who brought me her blue
sneaker. Now in the third
vanished year, I no longer
address the wall covered
with many photographs,
or call her "you"
in a poem. She recedes
into the granite museum
of JANE KENYON 1947 - 1995.
I long for the absent
woman of different faces
who makes metaphors
and chops garlic, drinking
a glass of Chardonnay,
oiling the wok, humming
to herself, maybe thinking
how to conclude a poem.
When I make love now,
something is awry.
Last autumn a woman said,
"I mistrust your ardor."
This winter in Florida
I loathed the old couples
my age who promendaded
in their slack flesh
and held hands. I gazed
at young women with desire
and outrage-unable to love
or work, to stay home
or travel, to die or live.
Hours are slow and weeks
rapid in their vacancy.
Each day lapses as I recite
my complaints. Lust is grief
that has turned over in bed
to look the other way.
--The Razor--
She sat in the booth
across from him in shadow
and her wide brown eyes
softened and flared
as she spoke remembering
the sickly adored
father of her girlhood—
how she brought him tea
and his newspaper; how
she stood beside him
while he shaved, her head
as high as the washbowl,
and lathered her face
the way he did, and shaved
using her forefinger
as a Gillette Safety Razor.
Her voice in an ardor
of old tenderness
lightened the darkness
of the bar at midnight.
She pigtailed his hair
and in his room rubbed
moisturizer from a jar
to smooth his wrinkles.
--Affirmation--
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
