by David Lehman
(1964)
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911–1983)
Life Story
After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all
along,
and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his
mouth,
and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
(1956)
MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980)
What I See
Lie there, in sweat and dream, I do, and “there”
Is here, my bed, on which I dream
You, lying there, on yours, locked, pouring love,
While I tormented here see in my reins
You, perfectly at climax. And the lion strikes.
I want you with whatever obsessions come—
I wanted your obsession to be mine
But if it is that unknown half-suggested strange
Other figure locked in your climax, then
I here, I want you and the other, want your obsession,
want
Whatever is locked into you now while I sweat and
dream.
(1968)
MAY SWENSON (1913–1989)
A New Pair
Like stiff whipped cream in peaks and tufts afloat,
the two on barely gliding waves approach.
One’s neck curves back, the whole head to the eyebrows
hides in the wing’s whiteness.
The other drifts erect, one dark splayed foot
lifted along a snowy hull.
On thin, transparent platforms of the waves
the pair approach each other, as if without intent.
Do they touch? Does it only seem so to my eyes’
perspective where I stand on shore?
I wish them together, to become one fleece enfolded, proud
vessel of cloud, shape until now unknown.
Tense, I stare and wait, while slow waves carry them
closer. And side does graze creamy side.
One tall neck dips, is laid along the other’s back,
at the place where an arm would embrace.
A brief caress. Then both sinuous necks arise,
their paddle feet fall to water. As I stare,
with independent purpose at full sail, they steer apart.
(1985)
ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER (1915–1981)
The Milkman
The door was bolted and the windows of my porch
were screened to keep invaders out, the mesh of rustproof
wire sieved the elements. Did my throat parch
then sat I at my table there and ate with lust
most chaste, the raw red apples; juice, flesh, rind and core.
One still and summer noon while dining in the sun
I was poulticing my thirst with apples, slaking care,
when suddenly I felt a whir of dread. Soon, soon,
stiff as a bone, I listened for the Milkman’s tread.
I heard him softly bang the door of the huge truck
and then his boots besieged my private yard. I tried
to keep my eyes speared to the table, but the suck
of apprehension milked my force. At last he mounted
my backstairs, climbed to the top, and there he stood still
outside the bolted door. The sun’s colour fainted.
I felt the horror of his quiet melt me, steal
into my sockets, and seduce me to him from
my dinner. His hand clung round the latch like rubber.
I felt him ooze against the screen and shake the frame.
I had to slide the bolt; and thus I was the robber
of my porch. Breathing smiling shape of fright,
the Milkman made his entrance; insistent donor,
he held in soft bleached hands the bottled sterile fruit,
and gave me this fatal, this apostate dinner.
Now in winter I have retreated from the porch
into the house and the once red apples rot where
I left them on the table. Now if my throat parch
for fruit the Milkman brings a quart for my despair.
(1955)
RUTH STONE (BORN 1915)
Coffee and Sweet Rolls
When I remember the dingy hotels
where we lay reading Baudelaire,
your long elegant fingers, the nervous ritual
of your cigarette; you, a young poet working
in the steel mills; me, married
to a dull chemical engineer.
Fever of having nothing to lose;
no luggage, a few books, the streetcar.
In the manic shadow of Hitler, the guttural
monotony of war; often just enough money
for the night. Rising together in the clanking
elevators to those rooms where we lay like embryos;
helpless in the desire to be completed;
to be issued out into the terrible world.
All night, sighing and waking, insatiable.
At daylight, counting our change, you would go for coffee.
Then, lying alone, I heard the sirens,
the common death of everything and again
the little girl I didn’t know
all in white in a white casket;
the boy I once knew, smashed with his motorcycle
into the pavement, and what was said,
“made a wax figure for his funeral,”
came into me. I had never touched the dead.
Always the lock unclicked and you were back,
our breakfast in a paper sack.
What I waited for was the tremor in your voice.
In those rooms with my eyes half open,
I memorized for that austere and silent woman
who waited in the future,
who for years survived on this fiction;
so even now I can see you standing thin and naked,
the shy flush of your rising cock pointed toward heaven,
as you pull down the dark window shade.
(1995)
THOMAS M CGRATH (1916–1990)
from Letter to an Imaginary Friend
Sweet Jesus at morning the queenly women of our youth!
The monumental creatures of our summer lust!
Sweet fantastic darlings, as full of juice
as plums,
Pneumatic and backless as a functional dream
Where are ye now?
Where were ye then, indeed?
Walking three-legged in the sexual haze,
Drifting toward the Lion on the bosomy hills of summer,
In the hunting light, the marmoreal bulge of the moon,
I wooed them barebacked in the saddling heat.
First was Inez, her face a looney fiction,
Her bottom like concrete and her wrestling arms;
Fay with breasts as hard as hand grenades
(Whose father’s shot gun dozed behind the door),
Barefooted Rose, found in the bottom lands
(We laid the flax as flat as forty horses,
The blue bells showering); Amy with her long hair
Drawn in mock modesty between long legs;
And Sandy with her car, who would be driving and do it;
And June who would roll you as in a barrel down hill—
The Gaelic torture; Gin with her snapping trap,
The heliotropic quim: locked in till daybreak;
Literary Esther, who could fox your copy,
And the double Gladys, one blonde, one black.
O great kingdom of Fuck! And myself: plenipotentiary!
Under the dog star’s blaze, in the high rooms of the moonlight,
In the doze and balance of the wide noon,
I hung my pennant from the top of the windy mast:
Jolly Roger sailing the want-not seas of the summers.
And under the coupling of the wheeling night
Muffled in flesh and clamped to the sweaty pelt
Of Blanche or Betty, threshing the green baroque
Stacks of the long hay—the burrs stuck in our crotch,
The dust thick in our throats so we sneezed in spasm—
Or flat on the floor, or the back seat of a car,
Or a groaning trestle table in the Methodist Church basement,
And far in the fields, and high in the hills, and hot
And quick in the roaring cars: by the bridge, by the river,
In Troop Nine’s dank log cabin where the Cheyenne flows:
By light, by dark, up on the roof, in the celler,
In the rattling belfry where the bats complained,
Or backed against trees, or against the squealing fences,
Or belly to belly with no place to lie down
In the light of the dreaming moon.
(1962)
ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–1988)
The Torso (Passage 18)
Most beautiful! the red-flowering eucalyptus,
the madrone, the yew
Is he…
So thou wouldst smile, and take me in thine arms
The sight of London to my exiled eyes
Is as Elysium to a new-come soul
If he be Truth
I would dwell in the illusion of him
His hands unlocking from chambers of my male body
such an idea in man’s image
rising tides that sweep me towards him
…homosexual?
and at the treasure of his mouth
pour forth my soul
his soul commingling
I thought a Being more than vast, His body leading
into Paradise, his eyes
quickening a fire in me a trembling
hieroglyph: At the root of the neck
the clavicle, for the neck is the stem of the great artery
upward into his head that is beautiful
At the rise of the pectoral muscles
the nipples, for the breasts are like sleeping fountains of
feeling in man, waiting above the beat of his heart,
shielding the rise and fall of his breath, to be
awakend
At the axis of his mid riff
the navel, for in the pit of his stomach the chord from
which first he was fed has its temple
At the root of the groin
the pubic hair, for the torso is the stem in which the man
flowers forth and leads to the stamen of flesh in which
his seed rises
a wave of need and desire over taking me
cried out my name
(This was long ago. It was another life)
and said,
What do you want of me?
I do not know, I said. I have fallen in love. He
has brought me into heights and depths my heart
would fear without him. His look
pierces my side • fire eyes •
I have been waiting for you, he said:
I know what you desire
you do not yet know but through me •
And I am with you everywhere. In your falling
I have fallen from a high place. I have raised myself
from darkness in your rising
wherever you are
my hand in your hand seeking the locks, the keys
I am there. Gathering me, you gather
your Self •
For my Other is not a woman but a man
the King upon whose bosom let me lie.
(1968)
CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–1994)
Hunk of Rock
Nina was the hardest of them
all,
the worst woman I had known
up to that moment
and I was sitting in front of
my secondhand black and white
tv
watching the news
when I heard a suspicious
sound in the kitchen
and I ran out there
and saw her with
a full bottle of whiskey—
a 5th—
and she had it and
was headed for the back porch
door
but I caught her and
grabbed at the bottle.
“give me that bottle, you
fucking whore!”
and we wrestled for the
bottle
and let me tell you
she gave me a good fight
for it
but
I got it away from her
and I told her to
get her ass out of
there.
she lived in the same place
in the back
upstairs.
I locked the door
took the bottle and a
glass
went out to the couch
sat down and
opened the bottle and
poured myself a good
one.
I shut off the tv and
sat there
thinking about what a
hard number
Nina was.
I came up with
at least
a dozen lousy things
she had done
to me.
what a whore.
what a hunk of rock.
I sat there drinking
the whiskey
and wondering
what I was doing
with Nina.
then there was a
knock on the
door.
it was Nina’s friend,
Helga.
“where’s Nina?”
she asked.
“she tried to steal
my whiskey, I
ran her ass
out of here.”
“she said to meet
her here.”
“what for?”
“she said me and her
were going to do it
in front of you
for $50.”
“$25.”
“she said $50.”
“well, she’s not
here…want a
drink?”
“sure…”
I got Helga a glass
poured her a
whiskey.
she took a
hit.
“maybe,” she said,
“I ought to go get
Nina.”
“I don’t want to see
her.”
“why not?”
“she’s a whore.”
Helga finished her
drink and I poured
her another.
she took a
hit.
“Benny calls me a
whore, I’m no
whore.”
Benny was the guy
she was shacked
with.
“I know you’re no
whore, Helga.”
“thanks. Ain’t ya got no
music?”
“just the radio…”
she saw it
got up
turned it
on.
some music came
blaring out.
Helga began to
dance
holding her whiskey
glass in one
hand.
she wasn’t a good
dancer
she looked
ridiculous.
she stopped
drained her drink
rolled her glass along the
rug
then ran toward
me
dropped to her knees
unzipped me
and then
she was down
there
doing tricks.
I drained my
