In Larry Vélez's “Appetizers,” with its Cheeveresque, slightly old-fashioned aura of split-levels and nylons, a last supper with the neighbors who have decided on a civilized, postmodern separation means facing the fact that some relationships end in failure, that some couples will rearrange the facts along with the furniture and eventually face the “dry rot” of divorce. But the speaker in “Appetizers,” in spite of the funeral song (that Mississippi threnody) he hears in all their hearts beneath the conversation of “school and sin and such,” is steadied by his wife and hears anew “the wildness rustle” of her nylons.
We think that's what most of the poems in Monotony tell us: Yes, you have begun to notice the slower, quieter pattern of your life together—there are fewer highs and lows than there were in Ecstasy—but somehow, even in the midst of messy renovation, daily routine, sullen kids, and boring dinner parties, uncertainty is only momentary. You continue to cling to your heart's desire, and the pleasure of love can still feel new.
Apex Plumbing
On a married Saturday,
We measure the
Downstairs bath.
At Apex Plumbing,
O the sinks are sad,
And the young man
Warns me:
That apricot commode
Is forever.
But I know
That the old tile,
Set in concrete,
Is the only
Obstacle
To my heart's desire.
ELIZABETH ASH VÉLEZ
The Zen of Housework
I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.
My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.
Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches
is setting in Western America.
I can see thousands of droplets
of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly—like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.
Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!
ALZOLYNAS
Lucy
Lucy lives behind the house back of the barn,
red oil drums set out to catch the rain.
The afternoon has almost emptied,
light moving in starts over the eastern trees.
She is outside sweeping her dust yard
into perfect swirls, the wings of a night moth.
She does this so that grass won't grow
and snakes can't hide.
All day she has boiled whites, watched the dirt
rise into the scalding wash water, all day
with what is worn next to the skin, hanging
the underwear out brilliant in the July sun.
At times I feel a darkness inside myself.
She tells me and her voice is so smooth
I feel a cold running in me
I have never felt before—
she tells me time will pass faster as I get older,
that I won't want so much anymore.
CHARLOTTE MATTHEWS
Kids
When you have helped to raise them right
They do not kill you in your sleep.
They've already done that many a night
When they were younger, the rage more deep.
JOHN A. WILLIAMS
Ceremony
I stopped liking artichokes when I stopped eating
butter. Fennel
I never liked.
One thing I've always hated
about you: I hate that you refuse
to have people at the house. Flaubert
had more friends and Flaubert
was a recluse.
Flaubert was crazy: he lived
with his mother.
Living with you is like living
at boarding school:
chicken Monday, fish Tuesday.
I have deep friendships.
I have friendships
with other recluses.
Why do you call it rigidity?
Can't you call it a taste
for ceremony? Or is your hunger for beauty
completely satisfied by your own person?
Another thing: name one other person
who doesn't have furniture.
We have fish Tuesday
because it's fresh Tuesday. If I could drive
we could have it different days.
If you're so desperate
for precedent, try
Stevens. Stevens
never traveled; that doesn't mean
he didn't know pleasure.
Pleasure maybe but not
joy. When you make artichokes,
make them for yourself.
LOUISE GLÜCK
Garden Party
The day makes its final appearance,
the sky rubbed out in places
with a blue so understated it's nearly
a memory of blue. Forget the vase
arranged on the table, the tulips
are too vague. Even the white
tablecloth is an erasure.
Imagine the pale drone
of dinner conversation,
the politics of brie, cold soup.
The good china infects everything.
Even now the knife falters,
the wine glass can't be saved.
Think of the blank mirrors
of spoons, the fish
whose whiteness is a given.
Consider the ravenous napkin.
SILVIA CURBELO
Vers de Société
My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I'm afraid—
Funny how hard it is to be alone.
I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,
Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted
Over to catch the drivel of some bitch
Who's read nothing but Which;
Just think of all the spare time that has flown
Straight into nothingness by being filled
With forks and faces, rather than repaid
Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,
And looking out to see the moon thinned
To an air-sharpened blade.
A life, and yet how sternly it's instilled
All solitude is selfish. No one now
Believes the hermit with his gown and dish
Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish
Is to have people nice to you, which means
Doing it back somehow.
Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines
Playing at goodness, like going to church?
Something that bores us, something we don't do well
(Asking that ass about his fool research)
But try to feel, because, however crudely,
It shows us what should be?
Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,
Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
; Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—
PHILIP LARKIN
Appetizers
When neighbors decided to split
from their split-level,
splitting from each other, a sign
sprang up above
the daffodils and day-
lilies, a signifier
of civilized desire.
Imperatives of age, our Age:
rearrange the furniture, friends
and facts; exchange the teen
and her weedy attendants
for the toddler
and his teddy bear,
simplify a thousand
and one contracts, compromises
and collateral confusions;
slice the Gordian knot.
Divorce, like dry rot, attracts
the soul's distracted gaze
and flowers forth our panic rage.
So they made a sacrifice
to Cupid and his Mom,
to Freud, Erato and the Dawn,
to both Madonnas and to Kali,
to Khepera and Aphrodite,
to Termagaunt and the stomach pump,
to Anyone and anything aligned with Love.
And like the others we,
my wife and I,
took the chance to eat for free
as dusk fell on
another postmodern lawn.
We drank our gin and tonics
“what drinking, what?”
And spoke of school
and sin and such.
And as we walked to dinner,
I whispered, “There seems to be no remedy
for the Mississippi threnody
I hear in all our hearts.”
She stared her delta stare,
all bluegreen drowning dares,
and smiled, “You're out of touch,
my dear. That hiss you think
you hear is really nothing more
than air escaping from the ice cubes
in our glasses, a sort of subatomic
race to fill the space that everyone's desire
to run in place leaves bare.”
“I'll never file on you,” I swore.
And heard anew the wildness rustle
of the nylons that she wore.
LARRY VÉLEZ
Uncertainty
WHEN LOVE KEEPS YOU GUESSING
We think that it is impossible to be in a relationship for any length of time without occasionally feeling uncertain and/or insecure. Uncertainty goes beyond feeling suffocated by domestic routine: It's not simply that you're tired of doing the dishes—you may worry that the relationship itself has gone stale. Or you may decide that you don't love him/her anymore. Even worse, what if she/he doesn't love you anymore?
The poems in this section articulate and define the moments when that “lovin' feeling” seems to have morphed into that what-am-I-doing-with-him/her feeling. Still, we believe it's helpful to note that any enduring relationship will sometimes feel—for short periods of time and for many different reasons—wrong, wrong, wrong! And we believe that these poems will help you recognize these moments, sigh a little, maybe even laugh a little, and then keep on going until you find yourself back in bliss and “believing in nothing but love.”
Uncertainty may well begin with the knowledge that no matter how emotionally and physically entwined the two of you have been, you are still very separate human beings. The fifth-century Indian poet Bhartrhari poignantly measures the distance you've come from feeling so close to your lover that the two of you are one: “What has now happened to us two,/That you are you, and I am me?”
Yes, there is a certain sadness about this realization, but we also believe that Dr. Freud and Dr. Phil will tell us that any two people who want to make love last must come to terms with their mutual independence. This is a crucial stage of romance that is both necessary and healthy.
But still, there are times when one or both of you may feel that separation has turned to alienation. In “Talking in Bed,” Philip Larkin shows us a relationship brought to a sad standstill: the two lovers are in bed, where, away from routine, work, and kids, they expect to rediscover intimacy. Bed, says Larkin, is the place where it “ought to be easiest.” Yet as “more and more time passes silently,” the lovers in the poem are more than separate—they are truly apart from each other, unable to find words “true and kind” that will bring them back together. This poem shows us both lovers at a loss, unable to understand or grasp their failure to communicate, and worst of all, “nothing shows why.”
So it's come to this: lying here with the person you thought was the love of your life, but feeling profoundly alone. Perhaps, you think, if you could only figure out the “why” of this sudden desolation, you could fix things. In “Girls,” Pablo Neruda suggests that love will always bow to time, that if we wait long enough, time will get us all, reduce all love to contemptuous familiarity: “see how it passes/dragging the heavenly stones,/destroying flowers and leaves.” Perhaps, the speaker suggests, it's better to stick to one-night stands (“certain night journeys,/certain compartments”) than to seek “the great love.” Ah, but no, the narrator tells us that he will battle time, he will find the disappointed girl, and she will not tremble in the face of his love. So time alone, Neruda suggests, will not necessarily defeat love.
Maybe you've known plenty of relationships that have endured over the years (let's see, well, there's Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), but perhaps your uncertainty about this particular relationship is fueled by your very own seemingly inescapable history of loss: Mom and Dad, years of fractious fury or silent misery and then a long and bitter divorce. In Kate Bingham's “Because my mother and father…,” the speaker feels doomed by the failure of her parents' relationship. She is the product of parents who hurt each other; therefore, she will repeat the cycle of abandonment and pain. The love she thinks that she feels is really just a feeble and unflattering imitation of a bad marriage.
So yes, this reflection on the why of your momentary misery may leave you feeling as if your heart's desire is no longer your lover but a room of your own, or a bed of your own. We think that William Carlos Williams's “Nantucket” captures what is really a romantic and, if we're honest with ourselves, false ideal of aloneness: We imagine “flowers through the window” instead of looming darkness, and “smell of cleanliness” instead of the smell of diaper pails; we long for the simplicity of a single pitcher, a single tumbler, an immaculate white bed. But we think that reading these poems can help lead to the knowledge that relationships are not immaculate, not pure; they are often messy, occasionally smelly, and they sometimes feel hopeless. If, though, you can give up the impossible desire for perfection, you may realize that a bad night or two, some uncertainty, and some feelings of alienation will be part of any relationship worth hanging on to.
Ah, well, don't breathe that sigh of relief too soon. Relationships can sometimes feel like a teeter-totter, with power tipping back and forth between the two of you. If you're on top, you might decide that you've made a terrible mistake. Perhaps you wake up one morning and notice that both his hairline and his chin are receding. Or you coldly watch him eating Cheez Whiz straight from the jar while he laughs hysterically for three solid hours at the Three Stooges. You suddenly feel like Scarlett O'Hara, who spent her whole life mooning after Ashley Wilkes only to discover too late that it was Rhett Butler she truly loved.
Or perhaps you feel like the speaker in Jane Kenyon's “Biscuit.” This is not the love of your life; in fact, he's really just a trusting dog waiting for you to reward him with the doggie biscuit of your love, and really, you can't stand to look at him: “I can't bear that trusting face!” The speaker here has all the power. Her partner is waiting, begging, and she knows that he will take anything from her; she can substitute a stone for bread, and he's so pathetic that he will never know the difference.
But three days later, the balance of power has shifted. He's wiped the Cheez Whiz off his chin, and you see that he is kind to children, waitresses, and yo u. He doesn't leave h is dirty socks lying aro und; in fact, he cheerfully tidies up after you. He is your Rhett. So, finally past your bout of uncertainty, like the speaker in Rumi's shocking little poem “Last Night You Left Me and Slept,” you are ready to talk and be intimate in bed again; you turn to him and tell him that you'll be together “till the universe dissolves,” but he just mumbles something drunkenly and goes to sleep.
And before you know it, he's got ALL the control in the relationship. In Anna Akhmatova's “I Wrung My Hands Under My Dark Veil,” power shifts from one lover to the other in just three short stanzas. The speaker drives the lover away, makes him “drunk with an astringent sadness,” and two lines later, she's running after him, desperate to get him back. “I meant it all in fun,” she shouts; “Don't leave me, or I'll die of pain.”
But perhaps she (you) has gone too far this time. (He saw the look you gave him while he was watching the Stooges.) The lover in the poem is calm, not even passionately angry; he just smiles and tells her to get out of the rain (echo of Rhett Butler's famous “Frankly I don't give a damn”).
In Sam Holtzapple's “Terminal,” the speaker is powerless. He is consumed with anxiety and insecurity; he's terrified that his lover has moved on, that he is but a connecting stop—she is on her way somewhere else, perhaps to a new lover. Whoever is on the downside of the teeter-totter imagines the worst—like the lover in Carolyn Creedon's “Just a Sestina…,” who, of course, has her own doubts and imagines him rubbing your back while you imagine the new intimacy that he has found with her. The insecure one always feels “dishless and cold,” waiting for the lover to return and make things perfect again, hoping to be the way you were (like ugly duckling Barbra Streisand waiting for the golden Robert Redford in The Way We Were).
But guess what? “Surprise!” says Dorothy Parker. Here comes one more power shift: How could you ever imagine that he didn't love you? In fact, you see that trusting-doggie look in his eyes again, and, far from feeling your “heart fluttering with fear” that he should leave you, you're no longer sure that you want to be with him. The speaker in “Surprise” suggests that it is love's unvarying law that “one shall weep and one shall stray.” Add to that Marcel Proust's dictum that “we love only what we do not possess,” and we can see that yes, the back-and-forth of insecurity is part of any relationship, at least some of the time.
You Drive Me Crazy Page 4
