It’s tough love from a hard, blue flame,
And you can’t beat a pro at her own game.
It’s the long con. It’s the old switcheroo.
You think you’re a player, but the mark is you.
She’s married but lonely. She wishes she could.
Watch your hands! Oh, that feels good.
She whispers how much she needs a man.
If only he’d help her. She has a plan.
Their eyes meet, and he can tell
It’s gonna be fun, but it won’t end well.
He hears her plot with growing unease.
She strokes his cheek, and he agrees.
It’s a straight shot. It’s an easy kill.
If he doesn’t help her, some other guy will.
It’s a sleek piece with only one slug.
Spin the chambers and give it a tug.
The heat of her lips, the silk of her skin.
His body ignites. He pushes in.
They lie in the dark under the fan—
A sex-drunk chump, a girl with a plan.
VII. LOVE
THANKS FOR REMEMBERING US
The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they’re not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.
The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can’t
throw out a gift we’ve never owned.
THE SUNDAY NEWS
Looking for something in the Sunday paper,
I flipped by accident to Local Weddings,
Yet missed the photograph until I saw
Your name among the headings.
And there you were, looking almost unchanged,
Your hair still long, though now long out of style,
And you still wore that stiff, ironic look
That was your smile.
I felt as though we sat there face to face.
My stomach tightened. I read the item through.
It said too much about both families,
Too little about you.
Finished at last, I put the paper down,
Stung by jealousy, my mind aflame—
Hating this man, this stranger whom you loved,
This printed name.
And yet I clipped it out to put away
Inside a book like something I might use,
A scrap I knew I wouldn’t read again
But couldn’t bear to lose.
SPEECH FROM A NOVELLA
Every night I wake and find myself
Alone in this strange bedroom. Always puzzled,
I walk into the hallway, blinking at the lights
And somehow know I’m on the highest floor
Of an enormous mansion full of people.
Then leaning on the banister I hear
The noise of a party down below,
And sad, slow music drifting up the stairwell
Like one last waltz that an exhausted band
Will play to satisfy an audience
That won’t go home. Curious, I descend
The elegantly curving staircase, finding
Each floor darker and more crowded, people
Everywhere: on the landing, in the corridors,
Some staring, others arguing, most so drunk
They don’t even notice that I’m there.
Then someone calls, “Mary, come down, come down,
And dance with us!” I try to answer him,
But it’s so dark and crowded I can’t see
The bottom yet, and I keep walking down
Until the music, laughter, cheap perfume,
The shouting people, all the smoke from cigarettes
Make me so dizzy I could faint, and still
He calls me, “Mary, come down, come down,”
And as I reach for him, the voices pause,
The music stops, and there is nothing there
But one voice laughing in another room.
SPEAKING OF LOVE
Speaking of love was difficult at first.
We groped for those lost, untarnished words
That parents never traded casually at home,
The radio had not devalued.
How little there seemed left to us.
So, speaking of love, we chose
The harsh and level language of denial
Knowing only what we did not wish to say,
Choosing silence in our terror of a lie.
For surely love existed before words.
But silence can become its own cliché,
And bodies lie as skillfully as words,
So one by one we spoke the easy lines
The other had resisted but desired,
Trusting that love renewed their innocence.
Was it then that words became unstuck?
That star no longer seemed enough for star?
Our borrowed speech demanded love so pure
And so beyond our power that we saw
How words were only forms of our regret.
And so at last we speak again of love,
Now that there is nothing left unsaid,
Surrendering our voices to the past,
Which has betrayed us. Each of us alone,
With no words left to summon back our love.
EQUATIONS OF THE LIGHT
Turning the corner, we discovered it
just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—
a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long
resting between the noisy avenues.
The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves
across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window
glowing through the ivy-decked facade
promised lives as perfect as the light.
Walking beneath the trees, we counted all
the high black doors of houses bolted shut.
And yet we could have opened any door,
entered any room the evening offered.
Or were we so deluded by the strange
equations of the light, the vagrant wind
searching the trees, that we believed this brief
conjunction of our separate lives was real?
It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,
a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,
a curl of smoke flaring from a match,
haunting a world it could not touch or hear.
There should have been a greeting or a sign,
the smile of a stranger, something beyond
the soft refusals of the summer air
and children trading secrets on the steps.
Traffic bellowed from the avenue.
Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,
and at the end what else could we have done
but turn the corner back into our life?
THE VOYEUR
… and watching her undress across the room,
oblivious of him, watching as her slip
falls soundlessly and disappears in shadow,
and the dim lamplight makes her curving frame
seem momentarily both luminous
and insubstantial — like the shadow of a cloud