Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion a Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio Univers

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Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion

A thesis presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Jennifer S. Kanke

June 2009

This thesis titled

Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion

JENNIFER S. KANKE

has been approved for

the Department of English

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Jill A. Rosser

Associate Professor of English

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

Kanke, Jennifer S., M.A., June 2009, English, Creative Writing

Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion (67 pp.)

Director of Thesis: Jill A. Rosser

As a collection of poetry, Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion begins to examine the joys and challenges of monogamous partnership in the 21st century. The introduction discusses the work of Kim Addonizio, Lucia Perillo, and Jane Kenyon as established poets writing about romantic relationships. The poems in Crash Course in the

Philosophy of Passion seek to navigate a space within confessional poetry between the anger and edginess of Addonizio and the placidity of Kenyon while simultaneously avoiding the ennui of Perillo. The poems seek to communicate the passion that can be found in the quiet quotidian.

Approved: ______

Jill A. Rosser

Associate Professor of English 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An infinite number of stacks of wood from Ikea can never express my gratefulness to my husband Tim for his support in this project and for his willingness to

allow immeasurable personal details to be shared with total strangers. My gratitude is

also owed to Jennifer Colatosti and Echo Railton for letting me breathe in their

awesomeness and to Ashley Good and Carling Futvoye for helping me learn to run, both

physically and metaphorically. Thanks to David E. Wanczyk for letting me beat him at

Trivial Pursuit once in awhile, even when I insist that William of Orange and William the

Conqueror are the same person. I'd also like to acknowledge the never ending strength,

listening ears, and decaf coffees given to me by Lydia McDermott and Megan Villegas.

Finally, for their creative input and support, I would like to thank Jill Rosser, Mark

Halliday, and Janis Butler Holm. 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Abstract ...... 3

Acknowledgments...... 4

Introduction: Confessionalism and the DesirabIlity of the Quotidian ...... 7

Works Cited ...... 23

Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion ...... 24

I want to be good ...... 25

The Smell of Curve for Women ...... 26

Origami of the Seventh-Grade Girl ...... 27

Love in the Days of Grunge ...... 28

Breathing Room ...... 31

Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion ...... 32

The Smell of Curve for Men ...... 33

Swinging Door ...... 34

I May Have Unrealistic Expectations ...... 36

Why I Wish For 800 Chickens ...... 37

Lines Composed While My Mother-In-Law ...... 39

Remains in ICU with Pneumonia ...... 39

Funerals in Winter ...... 41

Rt. 13, Mid-March ...... 42

This Will Not Be My Last Midwestern Winter ...... 43

Vacation of the Tomboys ...... 44 6

Advertisement for Fall ...... 45

The Old Woman Who Did Not Like The Wind ...... 46

Dream for Anne Sexton ...... 47

Freeway Spring Song ...... 49

Saturday Afternoon in a Coffeeshop ...... 52

How Not To Have An Affair ...... 53

Fifteen Wild Decembers ...... 56

Lyotard in LaGuardia ...... 57

Daughter of Descartes ...... 58

Having It Out With My Fertility ...... 60

Ghost of Zygotes Past ...... 61

Cropping ...... 62

That Break-Up ...... 63 caution: do not use with mono devices ...... 65

Sex and Housekeeping ...... 66

INTRODUCTION: CONFESSIONALISM AND

THE DESIRABILITY OF THE QUOTIDIAN

The other night I had a dream. I was on a bus filled with confessional poets. No

one famous was there, just your average stereotype: sexy (oh so sexy) women bitterly

raving about being abused by their fathers and lovers, self-abasing men thinking about how they might get to be the next lover of the sexy woman beside them, and everyone talking insistently and loudly about nothing but themselves. In the dream I tried to talk to

one, a woman who was all cleavage with mascara running down her face from her

copious tears. All questions led back to her; politics, the economy, the weather,

everything revolved around her with no discussion of anything else. Her logic was flawed

and she struck me as slightly hysterical, bordering on manic laughter at times. I found

myself wondering: Why am I on this bus? Should I be on it in the first place? Where is it

actually going? My dream seems to represent the worst stereotype of the general public

(and of some other poets) about confessionalism. In her exploration of the allure of bad-

girl imagery in confessional poetry, Lucia Perillo summarizes this perception saying that

confessional poetry has "come to mean a large degree of self-absorption combined with

poorly edited melodrama" (Perillo 123). This definition is problematic for many reasons.

Can't all poets be accused at one time or another of self-absorption? And if melodrama

consists of overdrawn appeals to emotion then it seems that what constitutes melodrama

is subjective, leaving no poet ever secure of the label of confessionalism. Plus, I don't like

this definition. My background in education makes me shudder to think of being self- 8

absorbed and my background as a former melodramatic adolescent girl makes me smell

the Aqua Net and Dr. Pepper. Some may want to dismiss confessional poetry this way,

but I've grown out of these things. Yet something draws me to the label. Something tells

me that my poetry fits under confessionalism, but not under this particular

conceptualization of it.

Yet more widely accepted, less vitriolic, descriptions still do not seem to make me

any happier. According to Steven Gould Axelrod, there are three characteristics of confessional poetry:"an undisguised exposure of painful personal event…a dialectic of private matter with public matter…and an intimate, unornamented style"(98). But can anything ever be wholly undisguised in poetry? Can't all poetry be said to be an interplay between private and public? Don't many poets use plain language and create an air of closeness with their readers? Even though this definition makes space for my poetry, it might provide just a little too much wiggle room. Using this definition poets like Ted

Kooser and Mark Jarman could be placed in the confessional mode alongside Kim

Addonizio and Sharon Olds. This seems not only inaccurate, but slightly laughable.

So I turn to yet a third definition that better encapsulates what confessional poetry in the 21st century seems to be, even though it still does not fully define my poetry. In a recent review of Erin Belieu's collection Black Box, Tony Barnstone states, "along with the intense and inventive invective, the blend of high and low diction, the relentless and

acrobatic metaphorizing, the intense personal grief, the self-hatred, the extreme and frank

sexuality, and the use of revenge poems to mourn the loss of the loved one, all place this poetry squarely in the confessional camp" (7). This definition seems fair. It is non- 9 judgmental as Axelrod's is but seems to express the bitterness, anger, and taboo-flouting found in confessional poetry. I manage five out of seven of the characteristics, lacking only the invective and the revenge. But really these should only count as one issue: anger.

What seems to set my poems apart from other confessional poets is my lack of anger, yet without leaning toward the reticence of Elizabeth Bishop or Jane Kenyon.

Why confessional poets, especially female poets, are full of rage isn't necessarily a mystery. Feminist theory has been exploring this topic for years. According to Julia

Lesage, "sometimes our suppressed rage feels so immense that the open expression of it threatens to destroy us" (422). The confessional does not allow it to build up to that explosive point. Kim Addonizio vents her poetic rage on ex-lovers, ex-convicts and sometimes even on ex-selves. She may come across as bitter, but her consistent expression of rage allows her to minimize her suppression and thus lessens the threat that these emotions will do long-term harm to herself. And if a few ex-boyfriends get their feelings hurt, so be it. I admire Addonizio's ability to express her toughness and rage, yet it is this very characteristic that causes me to feel that my poetry cannot find a home in the confessional movement. I am what many would call "the good girl": married to my college sweetheart for nearly ten years, a reliable worker who seldom misses deadlines, and the moral compass and willing-counselor ear for my friends. Addonizio's poetic persona has been called many names, but I will just refer to it as her "bad-girl tough mask." We struggle with the same questions about the nature of love, desire, and self- fulfillment. However, we seem to come up with different answers. 10

Addonizio manages to work anger and sex into nearly every poem with little indication that the narrators want to have that rage mitigated or transformed in any manner. This is exemplified in the poem "Muse" from her 2004 collection What is This

Thing Called Love. The poem can rightfully be taken as a metaphor for how a poet might feel about the act of creating art. However, it can also easily, and just as accurately, be read on a simply narrative level:

When I walk in, men buy me drinks before I even reach the bar.

They fall in love with me after one night, even if we never touch.

I tell you I've got this shit down to a science.

They sweat with my memory, alone in cheap rooms they listen

to moans through the wall and wonder if that's me,

letting out a scream as the train whines by.

But I'm already two states away, lying with a boy I let drink rain from the pulse at my throat.

No one leaves me, I'm the one that chooses. I show up like money on the sidewalk.

Listen, baby. Those are my high heels dangling from the phone wire.

I'm the crow flapping down, that's my black slip

you catch sight of when the pain twists into you so deep

you have to close your eyes and weep like a goddamned woman.

There is a power given to the overtly sexual woman who is in control of a situation. She chooses her partners. She creates pain. And, the ultimate show of power, she is able to speak dismissively of the entire situation and her words easily fit into Barnstone's

"inventive invective": "I tell you I've got this shit down to a science" (5). This female speaker takes joy in the diminution of the man caused by her sexual agency: "Listen, baby" and "weep like a goddamned woman" (15, 20). As in much of her work,

Addonizio's speaker in "Muse" revels in the power rush of selecting multiple sexual partners. Her poems seem to imply that there is a direct relation between the amount of power a female speaker has and the amount of moral distance between the speaker's life and societal norms.

Having grown up on turn of the 20th Century books glorifying goodness, pluck, and vigor like Luke Larkin's Luck and A Girl of the Limberlost, this is a hard world for me to buy into. Reading Addonizio's work occasionally makes me feel as if I've been punched in the stomach by a high-school friend who later murders a man in a state park in Idaho. Her speakers sidle in as friends, titillate me but then leave me feeling like the world is the kind of dangerous and cruel place that mothers warn their children about.

Her heroines are definitely not Gene Stratton Porter or Horatio Alger Jr. material. Am I afraid to be aligned with her because I'm incapable of shaking off these early Christian roots? Am I so unthinkingly resigned to a conservative sexual morality that I turn off to her poems instantly? If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all? Possibly, but I 12

don't feel that would be an accurate read. There are times when I feel Addonizio's

acerbic wit and hard-edged toughness serve her well, primarily when she turns them

away from her love life and toward societal problems. She enters into this more post-

confessional mode in "One Nation Under God" where she deftly proves a point about

where xenophobia and self-absorption can lead. The poem starts off with a speaker who

seems like a typical Addonizio speaker, edgy, angry, and self-interested, sharing taboo feelings and language: "Don't you wish you could plane away/ your ass, your thighs, half your nose,/until you looked right?" (4-6-). But rather than continue to stay with the self, the poem reaches out and applies this logic of dissatisfaction to society at large:

And speaking of executions. How many have there been lately? Not nearly enough.

We've got problems in this country I tell you. If thy right eye offend thee you know what to do. And thy left eye too. (42-47)

When the speaker of this poem says "I'm going to want to fuck you up really bad" (36), the reader feels the anger but it is a rage that seems to have a purpose other than revenge for interpersonal wrongs. There is a sense that the speaker of this poem is offering the reader insight and a warning. This is Addonizio's tough mask at its best.

However, more often than not she remains in the realm of being dissatisfied with romantic relationships with very little redemption and no positive resolutions. This characteristic of her work is notable in the poem "Ex-Boyfriends," where she describes ex-lovers as "your loves, your victims,/ your good dogs or bad boys, and they're over/ you now" (7-8) and "they've been fired and need a loan,/ their new girlfriend hates you," 13

(14-15). In the end, all of the negative descriptions of exes culminate in the realization

that the current boyfriend will eventually be an ex as well. His look is compared to the

one given by exes and the end description of trucks on the highway reinforces the feeling

of desolation and desertion the speaker finds in romantic relationships:

…It's the same way your current boyfriend gazed at you last night, before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs of headlights from the freeway's passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel, hauling their loads between cities, warehouses, following the familiar routes of their loneliness. (22-30)

There is intimacy, but we know that it will be short-lived. As in most contemporary confessional poetry, the couple will never be together long in a Kim Addonizio poem.

My unprofessional response to poems such as "Ex-Boyfriends" is to want to quietly slip

Addonizio the contact information for a good counselor, pat her on the back and say

"honey, it just doesn't have to be that way" and then call her "Meanie McMeanstein" behind her back. Her experience of love does not match mine in the slightest, and for this

I feel very grateful.

The experience of love and sensuality expressed in my collection more closely resembles that found in the work of Lucia Perillo, which often celebrates the permanence of relatively healthy, stable relationships without turning a blind eye to their challenges.

This aspect of her poetry is most notable in the sonnet "Long Time Too Long" from her 14

1999 collection The Oldest Map with the Name America. In the narrative of this poem, a

couple abandons necessary gardening tasks to have sex in the attic:

A long time, too long, since we have done – this: abandoned our tools while the sun's still high and retraced our trail up the attic steps. The grass still wants mowing as the quilts sigh back over the bed; the nightshade tendril winds another turn round the tomato. But this is work too, this letting clothes fall in such harsh yellow light that what to do with what lies underneath them must all be relearned. Let the vines choke our one good rose, let the spade stand, the mason jars empty: we're sweating enough at each other's lips. Leave the fallen plums to the white-faced wasps, beating their drunk wings against the windows. (Perillo 80)

The poem does not directly state the relationship; however, the reader can assume the couple is in some form of long-term pair bonding due to the pronoun usage throughout the poem. Nothing belongs to the "I" and nothing belongs to the "you," all objects in the poem are "ours": "our tools," "our trail up the attic steps," and "our one good rose" (2, 3,

10). Although we do not know for sure that this couple is married, we can assume they are in a permanent relationship by the indication of joint ownership.

Perillo seems to be both celebrating and justifying the choice of the speaker to make love instead of doing needed yard work. There is also an expressed fear that perhaps the speaker and her partner are not making the correct choice. The tools have not just been left, but have been abandoned. The nightshade tendril is not just growing, but is wrapping around the tomato which, if left unchecked, will eventually kill the tomato. To justify her choice and psychologically release her own guilt about it, the speaker frames 15 the sex act as being work as well. Yes, the speaker is enjoying sex, but don't worry, forsaken spade and rake or Serengeti- Plains-high-grass, she's not just goofing off here, it's hard work too. As someone who has been in a relationship for fifteen years, I identify with the theme of "Long Time Too Long" and agree that maintaining a healthy relationship takes effort. However, I also fear that poems such as this one when compared with Addonizio's "Muse" or similar poems, portray monogamous sex as a dutiful labor and sex with multiple partners as empowerment, perhaps even as "real" passion. Why would anyone want to enter into a marriage or civil union if being single is so much more of an emotional rush? Stability is for squares.

In my poem "Sex and Housekeeping," I confirm Perillo's presentation

(accusation?) of connection as work while intimating that perhaps the single bar scene is not the glory-land of power Addonizio portrays it as. In "Sex and Housekeeping" the speaker is not rigidly dogmatic against the kind of power charge one can get from the attention of strangers and acknowledges this point: "I envy you their eyes. I cannot tell/ if it is my nose or my wedding ring that/ lets me move unwatched" (15-17). However, these three lines of jealousy stand in contrast to the rest of the first stanza which focuses on the amount of work the single friend must put forth for one sexual encounter, which the speaker's tone implies is hollow and merely short-term:

Instinctively they know the work you've done: two hours on clothes, and curls, and lashes, three to clean your rented house, putting away pictures of exes and hiding, if not washing, dirty underwear. Everything looks tidy, everything seems neat and clean and right like it never is. ("Sex and Housekeeping" 21-26)

This mild admonishment of short-term human connection is heightened by the line break between lines 30 and 31: "Ten Touches to Make Him Stay/the Night" which implies that the speaker feels her single friend is looking for a long-term commitment instead of a one- night stand.

The last stanza of the poem echoes the ideas found in Perillo's "Long Time Too

Long" but without apologizing or justifying the couple's actions. Rather than contrasting the emotional and physical work of sustaining a long-term relationship with that of maintaining a garden, the speaker in my poem contrasts immediacy and anxiety surrounding the work necessary to procure a one-night stand with the relaxation and peace of the long-term relationship: "last week's fight unsettled. I held/ his hipbone to mine " (50-51). Although all relationships are work, "Sex and Housekeeping" tries to express that there is a comfort to knowing that neither the housework nor the emotional work has to be completed immediately. That there is space to relax, to think of other things, knowing all the while that the other person will still be there and will not leave just because the laundry is not put away (and in fact could have also put the laundry away himself). Without denying the Addonizian power rush, the speaker specifies the work that must go into obtaining such a thrill and prefers to work toward a relationship with more longevity. Even though there is familiarity in long-term relationships, there is desire as well.

The expression of desire and sensuality that I strive for is similar to that found in

Jane Kenyon's "The Shirt." Although the poem is sensual, no direct indication is given as to the relationship of the speaker to the objectified male. He could be a stranger hottie in 17

a club she will sleep with once and then dump or he could be her long-term partner. No

clues are given and it doesn't matter, the desire is the same:

The shirt touches his neck and smooths over his back. It slides down his sides. It even goes down below his belt– down into his pants. Lucky shirt.

This poem is just as erotic as Addonizio's work but lacks the anger and the edge.

Although there is sex, there is no mention of the power dynamics which are present in any relationship. Kenyon's poem lets the reader sit in a space of bliss for a moment

without calling us back to any gritty realities. These are six sexy lines. The "s" sound of

"shirt," "smooths" "slides" and "sides" and at the end of "goes" and "pants" glides the

reader along with the speaker's eye, the alliteration causing us to feel the erotic nature of this gaze. When we get to the last line, we understand without being told that the speaker is sexually aroused by the man in the shirt. We understand that the speaker's gaze, and perhaps her touch, becomes conflated with the shirt, that she wishes she could do what the shirt does. Kenyon communicates quotidian desire in a compressed space. This is not a desire that is aroused only by Addonizian anger and power struggles, but is one that can exist peacefully in the office or the home. It titillates us, but does not consume us. Leaves us feeling aroused but not angered or hurt.

Admiring Kenyon's ability to communicate the sensuality of daily life in few lines, I created the poem "Saturday Afternoon in a Coffeeshop" which describes the unexpected sensuality of a woman eating a cookie: 18

As if somewhere in those D cups is the answer to all you’ve never asked. As if in her slow chewing of a cookie, the grist of the world is ground up, swallowed down as more than nutmeg, flour, and eggs. (4-8)

Another of my poems which communicates this sensuality and joy in the quotidian is

"Lyotard in Laguardia." In this poem a small child's voice competes with the droning of voices in an airport: "Before /she tells us which or why, an uneasy toddler,/ not calmed by his mother’s hush-hushings, covers them all/ with his wild and unguarded, open- mouthed howl" (11-14). However, it is in my poem "Why I Wish for 800 Chickens," that

I feel the strongest connection to Kenyon's "The Shirt." In this poem, an article of clothing is connected to desire using a pair of pajamas. As in Kenyon's "The Shirt," the pajamas become conflated with the speaker; but rather than representing her physicality as the shirt does, they represent the speaker's emotional relationship to her husband:

I touch your pajamas, crumpled at the foot of the bed to remind me you will be back. No one would leave such nice pajamas. Ones that are worn to softness at the knees, they bend easily where you bend easily but still have good elastic at the waist to hold them firmly in place. Ones that keep you warm in November. Ones that are blue and green plaid, letting your hazel eyes be whatever color they want to be that night. (28-38)

Through the use of a normal household object, the speaker expresses that her husband cannot leave her because she is supportive yet flexible and thus is appropriate and acceptable regardless of his mood. In a poem primarily about the need for connection 19

transcending sexual desire, the husband's pajamas nonetheless express that there is still a

layer of physicality to that need.

Yet the work in my collection does not always communicate a moralistic preference for the monogamous relationship; nor is it without its moments of pain and heightened emotional conflict. Agreeing with Axelrod and Barnstone, Lucy Collins states that, "The expression of personal pain has been regarded as a hallmark of confessional poetry" (197). Being the overly sensitive soul that I am, most things cause me pain. I don't need to hit the bars looking for pain and suffering as Addonizio's speakers often do, I find pain in the cycles of the seasons when I say "no place to go but up/ without the filtration of stone to purify them,/ just evaporation and then the waiting"

("Rt. 13, Mid-March" 6-8). The pain is also there in "The Smell of Curve for Women" which does take place in a bar, but where the primary emotional center is in waxing nostalgic for my college days, but with certain adjustments:

Call to mind a darkened club with only flashes of neon in the corners smelling somehow of sweetness: That mix of amaretto, spilled beer, and your best friend’s perfume.

Don’t think about how she will wake you up with a clamor of your own pots and pans just two months later and tell you everything that she thinks is wrong with you. (1-9)

Even just seeing a pretty girl on a motorcycle, as in "Freeway Spring Song," can elicit

(irrational?) feelings of suffering from my speakers:

All there is, is this now, with middle-aged strangers watching her 20

as she goes by in the passing lane, riding on a curving shortcut through town that at her age I would have driven out of my way to avoid, as I still do with the twisting caverns of underground parking garages, intersections with obstructed views. (13-21)

However, those same poems also communicate a certain amount of joy as well. The

water in "Mid-March, Rt.13" will eventually find purification and is a pivotal part of a

cycle, the roommates in "The Smell of Curve for Women" had at least a few good nights,

and the girl on the motorcycle in "Freeway Spring Song" brings joy even while calling attention to the speaker's own failings.

Furthermore, my poetry is not a poetry of denial. Although I take issue with

Perillo's presentation of long-term sexual relationships as drudgingly dutiful, my collection as a whole does not turn the volume up on singing the praises of commitment

to drown out its inherent challenges. In both "Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion"

and "How Not to Have an Affair," my speakers struggle with issues of physical

attraction. The speakers daydream about the possibility of a relationship with someone

other than their current partners. In "Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion," the

object of affection is a waiter who the speaker imagines is attracted to her. She instructs

herself to "Watch him as he glides between/ you and your husband as he/ seats you in

your favorite spot, one/ where he can delight in your every move ("Crash Course" 7-10).

In "How Not to Have an Affair," the speaker is desperately trying to convince herself that

following an attraction to a physical conclusion is not the best idea: "When you need him,

bend over/ your loom instead. Shuttle forward,/ shuttle back, forward, back./ Understand 21

how all those hidden erotic scenes/ got woven into 15th century tapestries" (7-11). Her

attraction is eventually thwarted by the kind of self-loathing that allows the poem to be

called confessional, according to Barnstone's definition: "try on all your clothes, finally

throw out the ones that are too tight,/become one cliché instead of the other, leave him/ to

the single girl his own age with gentle flapper waves in her hair/ and no back fat showing

through her sweater" (76-79).

Additionally, my poems do not deny the existence of the emotional struggles inherent in any long-term relationship. In "Breathing Room" the speaker contemplates the challenges of a partner who is too caring, both figuratively and literally suffocating her.

"Lines Composed while My Mother-In-Law Remains in ICU with Pneumonia" communicates the human desire for distraction from emotional pain by contrasting the speaker's need to be found physically attractive by strangers with her husband's need to buy a large quantity of wood rather than face the possibility of his mother's death. These poems do not stand on the sidelines of life, pom poms in hand, playing cheerleader for the Stepford monogamy team. They are authentic in their struggle. Yet as a whole the collection embraces the notion that long-term relationships are worth the effort and that the daily act of living the quiet life can be just as hot, sexy, and taboo as the life described by Kim Addonizio.

But am I a confessional poet? Where do I fit in? By applying this label to myself, am I courting my worst nightmare? Will I be perceived as a nattering woman obsessed with her own pain and cleavage? In the late 1980s, James Merrill described Elizabeth

Bishop as a poet engaged in a "life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman" (Voices 22

and Visions). Sometimes I feel I am the opposite, the normal woman struggling to prove

that she is actually a poet. Figuring out where my work has affinities and how I compare

to existing poetic traditions plays a pivotal role in my journey toward proving that I am a poet. This proving is not just for others, but for myself as well. I need to know I am connected to a tradition and not just someone writing from the void of her own head.

Given Barnstone's definition of confessional poetry, I feel I can legitimately stake claim to the name of confessional poet. However, I think we must encourage the definition of confessionalism to branch away from the revenge and anger. I will put on my own good- girl tough mask to stand up for joy and the desirability of the quotidian.

WORKS CITED

Addonizio, Kim. What Is This Thing Called Love. New York: Norton, 2004.

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,1978.

Barnstone, Tony. "Crashing the Confessional." American Book Review 28.4 (2007): 7.

"Elizabeth Bishop: One Art." Voices and Visions. Dir. Jill Janows. Public Broadcasting

System. 7 Apr. 1988.

Collins, Lucy. "Confessionalism." A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry Ed. Neil

Roberts. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.

Lesage, Julia. "Women's Rage." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary

Nelson and Larry Grossberg. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1988. 419-429.

Perillo, Lucia. I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and

Nature. San Antonio: Trinity UP, 2007.

— The Oldest Map with the Name America: New and Selected Poems. New

York: Random House, 1999.

CRASH COURSE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PASSION 25

I want to be good is that not enough? -Squeeze

The Smell of Curve for Women

Call to mind a darkened club with only flashes of neon in the corners smelling somehow of sweetness: That mix of amaretto, spilled beer, and your best friend’s perfume.

Don’t think about how she will wake you up with a clamor of your own pots and pans just two months later and tell you everything that she thinks is wrong with you. Don’t think about how she will tell everyone that you don't love your mother enough, quoting verbatim your side of nineteen telephone conversations, none of which paint you in a complimentary light. Don't think about how by commencement, you won't be able to stand her smile.

Just call to mind that night at the club when you danced to “Brown-Eyed Girl” and she threw an arm around your waist, pulled you closer and drunk whispered something meaningful, but entirely unintelligible. 27

Origami of the Seventh-Grade Girl -to Geni Imler 1975-2006

You asked for forgiveness then folded the words into a self-sealing shape the Mead Corporation never could have imagined in those lists of potential uses for their blue lined college-ruled. You drew sad eyes on the front under my name, then slid it over undetected in study hall.

This evening I expected the paper to be yellow, to come apart in my hand like phyllo dough or the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it’s not and it doesn’t. The note unfolded keeps the ghost of its former shape, rigor mortised into position by twenty years hiding in a jewelry box under the weight of earrings I don’t wear anymore and the butterfly pendant from Mike Burt, who wasn’t my boyfriend then but who could have been if he’d just asked.

I don’t know how old your daughter is or where you were living last year. Reading the note, these lapses embarrass me. We loved each other enough once to apologize. Your note doesn’t say for what and I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter now, this fight is lost in time. All I have left of it is this piece of paper ending with the line “Please don’t get mad at me too.” I can’t figure out how to fold back up correctly, even though the shape is there for me to follow. 28

Love in the Days of Grunge

My brother and his first ex-wife staked their hearts on Clapton and “Wonderful Tonight” but it wasn’t strong enough. My parents cling to Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and I pretend not to know why, to think of my father as such a smooth operator is painful in so many ways. We have no song to call our own, but what would our options have been?

Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun," its foaming girl video? Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box,” admittedly contains the word “heart” but also makes the promise that I’ll “eat your cancer ?" Could it have been King’s Missile and “Sex With You,” so like “Lay Lady Lay” but without pretense that there is romance hidden somewhere in the chords of a guitar and the mumblings of wanting?

Our choices were pretty limited really, as if watching Glasnost and Perestroika falter had stripped something away, shattered long-held fantasies that we too could have a “Red-Dawn-Rocky-IV-Hope-the-Russians-Love-Their-Children-Too” moment, and our generation lost its God-given ability to look each other in the eye and in all seriousness rhyme “June” with “moon.” And those of us grown old, or what at least feels unyoung, may wonder if it's better this way. If dissolving these illusionary shells to see the real-real beneath isn't the best way to go.

At seven, my father's world had a clay-covered Buddha that cracked and a monk discovering it was gold underneath all along. Twenty-five years later, Tylenol and Halloween candy came laced with the threat of cyanide or needles And the Black Leopard Karate Club in Alberta, Canada took an entire house apart using only their bare hands and feet.

There was no gold between the floor boards, but that's not what they were looking for. But neither was the monk in '57, he just saw a glint through a crack and went for it with a chisel. 30

Nourishment

I am sorry, but I am a pea planted too far out from the trellis. Do not reach for me, all I have are these roots and they cannot hold us both. If you spread an arm out to me, wrap it around my stalks and leaves, then we will pull each other to the ground.

Does this image ring true?

I do not want it to be right. I want to say, “lean on, reach out, hold tight.” I want to say that while June is moving continually on toward July’s heat that I have grown long enough to touch wood. 31

Breathing Room

Don't tell him you can't breathe. This has nothing to do with his weight, which is what he'll think. This has nothing to do with lung capacity or rib strength. This is all in your head, sinus infection, perhaps. Telling him would put you on top, where your arms will tire out. Where he will always say "Put your weight on me" and you'll try to think of a response.

Crash Course in the Philosophy of Passion

When he brings you pale ale or dark, chips or salsas, know that when he says “The verde’s not good today” he is just looking out for you, tender in the only way he is allowed.

Watch him as he glides between you and your husband, seats you in your favorite spot, one where he can delight in your every move. He has a bit of the otter in him, like he could slide through waters leaving no rippled surface behind, but deep waves underneath. And yes, a bit of a musky odor too which you will find somewhat appealing.

Do not ask for homemade crackers for that hot and steamy squash soup. He knows, without you saying, that you want them. Each time he sets down a dish, his hand will brush yours, then move up to smooth his hair and right above his beard a little blush will begin.

If he says “Would you like to try the raspberry tart tonight? It’s superb,” notice his eyes closing in anticipatory ecstasy as he leans down for a kiss, thinks better of it, refills your water glass instead.

The Smell of Curve for Men

The scent in the air and this shared kindness, move me to the spot on my lower lip, just left of center, where a decade ago this missed kiss did not land and I am flooded with his memory, this only man to almost get me drunk on a night at O'Hooley's when, I can't remember why, but he was there, and I was there and somehow we danced a ceilidh dance with shoes not right for this slippery business of whirling.

White Russian after White Russian, sweet but made stronger than I was used to, and I'd touch his arm even after the music had stopped, hoping he could not feel the cold of my ring against his warm skin. Now, to see a smile like his from a stranger only being courteous, holding the door for a woman with too many shopping bags, darkens the room to Friday-night dim, fills the air with his cologne and possibilities. 34

Swinging Door

Beauty, I disown you because you never came to me. I leave you nothing, not my eyes, not my smile not the pronounced cleft in my chin.

Beauty, had you wanted it everything could have been yours. My heart, my soul, my slightly webbed toes. But you stayed away too long thinking I would wait forever.

Beauty, you are too sure of yourself and I have grown tired of waiting. Go play in someone else's dreaming and leave me be, leave me in peace.

(The power goes out.)

Ah, Beauty, what a statement you make taking it all away. Have you cut the wires leaving me defenseless in the dark while you stalk me from the windows? I think I see the glint of your knife just now among the yews. Whether I accept you or not you will still hack me to bits with your fine-honed blade of wanting. Oh that desire to be what I will never be, and what I will never be, is you.

Am I wrong? Perhaps you've only flipped the switch to accentuate the candle flames on the birthday cake you've made for me. No serial killer but Better Crocker emerging through the swinging kitchen door telling me to remember you in the incandescents, the hum of the refrigerator, music from the hi-fi. 35

Although you never came to me, you danced around me: whirling dervish of modernity. Although you would not stop and grace me with classic features, slim waist, symmetrical teeth; I must take you where I find you. And where I find you is electrified.

I May Have Unrealistic Expectations

It's much better to sneeze than to cough I think since with sneezing we all know exactly what to do: "Bless you," "Thank you" "Gesundheit," "Danke." We've got this down with the only question being if it's a single sneeze or if there'll be more. But coughing, what a tricky thing that is. If we've a lozenge or some water, we offer it but how often do we have exactly what the cougher needs? Ignoring it completely, are we cold and callous, borderline sociopaths? Stopping to say "are you ok?" perhaps we make a big deal of just a little tickle, nothing much or draw attention to what they'd rather forget: emphysema, throat cancer, tonsilloliths.

I'd much rather sneeze though I fear I cough quite a bit. Anytime I feel that tickle in my nose I'm reminded of Bridget Fonda in Singles who just wants a man who says "Bless you" when she sneezes finally finding it in Matt Dillon. As they start to make out in an elevator, we know these Gen Xers are going be ok. Which is all well and good, but I have a million friends and strangers who know what to do when I sneeze, I need someone who knows what to do when I cough. 37

Why I Wish For 800 Chickens

Having just woken up from that dream, the one where you’ve told me you no longer want me and I’ve tried every word I have to win you back but still, still, still end up scrubbing the toilet while you are making other plans in the living room, I find your side cold. Sometimes you are in the kitchen and the sound of your breakfast dishes lets me know you have not left; Such a reassuring sound the old metal spoon and ceramic bowl make.

But sometimes the house is quiet; the house is dark.

And I wish for the 13th Century, to be the wife of King John's Royal Forester offering up 400 of her best laying hens just to spend one night with her husband, away so long on royal business that she couldn't remember the scent of his neck. The king taking her bribe even though he had no need for more chickens, granting just one night of warmth before sending her back to her own lands, making her husband stay on at the palace. More work to do, always, always more work to do.

But there is no one to bribe now, nothing I have worth bribing with.

I look at your alarm clock to remind me that you have not left for good, only for work. I touch your pajamas, crumpled at the foot of the bed that say you will be back. No one would leave such nice pajamas. Ones that are worn to softness at the knees, they bend easily where you bend easily but still have good elastic at the waist to hold them firmly in place. Ones that keep you warm in November. Ones that are blue and green plaid, letting your hazel eyes be whatever color they want to be that night. 38

So I remind myself you will be back.

But if there were a king accepting chickens for the return to my bed of a husband’s warm back to banish all abjection dreams, I’d give him the 400 he asked and 400 more as a gratuity. 39

Lines Composed While My Mother-In-Law Remains in ICU with Pneumonia

All the guys at Ikea want to get with me and I wish I could say that it’s because my hotness makes their eyes bulge like cartoon dangling-tongued wolves. That every guy I pass, from the ninety-year-old grandfather, smelling vaguely of pee right on down to the thirteen-year-old who refuses to tuck in his shirt, sees me and can’t control the urge to run his hands along my back or brush against me just noticeably enough that we both say “excuse me” but I’ll think nothing of it. Tonight I’ll be in forty male fantasies across the greater Pittsburgh area. But not how I want to be. Not slim-waisted and half-naked or licking a melting ice cream cone. Not for those hips I’ve trained to sultry doing Kili’s “Tahitian Cardio Workout.”

Instead, it’s all about the wood.

This precious pile of mismatched pieces: damaged things, left-over things, things that got returned after a week. Labeled “$39.99” and “cart not included” in the Sold As-Is section of the store. They’ve all been circling it for at least half an hour, while their women look on with narrowed eyes, folded arms and tapping feet. They lust for the armoires, bookshelves, kitchen islands they would build if only She would let them bring this home, running hands along the nearly knotless pine and feeling its seductive smoothness. They are entranced by the limitless possibilities of 200 planks with no plans included. And I, I the one acquiescing wife who says 40

“Whatever you need dear,”

And let him distract himself just a little more with fresh coffee, Swedish pastries.

Then he'll try once again to fit all this old wood into a too small sedan, before the chill in the January air becomes too much and we head back home. Eventually he may get to build something of his own, but for now, we must spend another week drinking cold vending machine coffee, eating peppermint candies for the rush of the sugar and not the taste. 41

Funerals in Winter

The sound of funerals in winter is the rustle of hands in pocketbooks searching for handkerchiefs to wipe noses, dry eyes, hide away old chewing gum. It is the sound of black and grey wool coats brought out only for this kind of day, with pockets full of cough drops and forgotten parking stubs. It is the sound of heels crunching on snow, breaking through top layers of ice or struggling through what is newly fallen without touching what is beneath it all: the dormant grass waiting for spring.

Rt. 13, Mid-March

Five miles from Buchtel the rain has turned to snow and the creek laps over the road. In a day the ground will freeze again leaving the flood waters trapped above ground, no place to go but up without the filtration of stone to purify them, just evaporation and then the waiting. Waiting for condensation, waiting to rain again, to flood again. Perhaps in another month more firmly Spring, when the water can soak into the ground, leaving impurities behind in sandstone and silt before rising up to flood us again. 43

This Will Not Be My Last Midwestern Winter

Do not ask me to leave in May when mid-spring rains are Lethean, as if winter never was, will never be again. When candy-scented Iris comes, there is no reason to go. Let me stay forever among the blooming without remembering the cold of just two months before where even electric fire and lamb's wool sweaters would not stop the ache in my thighs to get up and walk somewhere, anywhere, unprotected, somewhere, anywhere, walk to the south on Rt. 75 until I met the heat or froze myself along the way.

Vacation of the Tomboys

July's heat moves on toward August and we boil in our skins like crawdaddies in a pot, feet toughened now by months of shoelessness and something fearless has grown along with the black raspberry brambles that our grandmothers don't remember planting. No one says "be careful" and no one says "play nice." We are left in lawless country where the rough stones bridging the creek are the only highway, water skimmers the only queens. 45

Advertisement for Fall

There is something in this leaf mould make me say "I am half-sick of shadows" when in a month I know I will be full-sick for sure. When winter comes I will miss it, miss that crunch of cellulose sucked dry of all its summer fire gone now to rest in its roots. Miss that smell of wet children and sheep dogs with matted fur who, contrary to advertisements, do not wear yellow rain coats and galoshes, are not followed by admiring ducks but do sleep on latched rugs by warm fires. 46

The Old Woman Who Did Not Like The Wind

I sit upon my bench with lunch half-eaten waiting to share this spot of slanted October sun. Not wanting any company that isn't you, certainly not wanting her. Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet, but I am full-up on friends for now. She sits down anyway, asks if I like the wind.

Pinwheels blue and whirling and yellow bow-tailed kites I did not fly, second place sailboats with ripped spinnakers and windmill giants with Marfan syndrome are all there in me. I do not answer her. There is no sorting to a "yes" or "no."

"I don't like the wind" she says, unwrapping her sandwich and wiping her hands. Her voice so docile, her tones so shallow and wispy, all I can think of now is Shelley's wind. When was the last time she fell upon the thorns of life and did not break a hip? Was she ever tameless, and swift, and proud? Or has she always eaten tuna fish after morning aquatics? Has she awakened from summer dreams or does she not really sleep that much anymore?

My sense faints picturing her rummaging at midnight through stacks of old tabloids and papers trying to find the soporific one or reading the letters of old lovers to sink her into a lull of reminiscing with a cup of Sanka or chamomile tea. I suddenly grow gray with fear. "We sure got a lot of it last night" she exhales, takes a small bite. 47

Dream for Anne Sexton

“Each night before they went to sleep in their twin beds, he (Sexton’s husband) would sit beside her and smooth her hair, repeating, ‘Yes, you are my good girl’ until she drifted off to sleep.”

Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography, pg.155

In my dream the elevator moves quickly, not stopping until we are at the top and can look out on the skyline: Bright windows on dark backgrounds. Two men that I admire, who may or may not be becoming close friends, try to convince me to go to that arts and crafts hospital where I have never been, but where my father was once known by his silences. I curl up on the concrete roof, I will not move until my husband comes knowing he is the only one who can make me unfurl without my edges breaking down like dry October leaves.

II.

May all the suicides be reborn into a new morning where the moon has not faded away on the rising of the sun but hangs visible in the sky until nearly noon.

III.

“The leaves speak for themselves” was all your Joy wrote in the last letter you never got. Being so far away and thinking of you, she filled an envelope with fallen leaves, sent it off not knowing how much would change in the time it took to travel the distance to you. But would you have believed them 48 if they had arrived a few days earlier? Would their redness have said “I love you” loud enough for you to have heard them over all the For Chistsake Annes and the eternal call of Saint Mattress? Would their sweet mold and fire have convinced you that you were reformed, a good girl at last? That even after all you had done to her, all the breakdowns, all the behaviors so hard to explain to her friends, all the self-doubts you passed down like genetic Christmas gifts, she still cherished you enough to stoop and gather, gather and send these colors you found so joyful and precious?

No, you’re right, they wouldn’t me either.

Freeway Spring Song

Wind, reach out to her, this girl, not more than sixteen, with a Kawasaki humming beneath her holding tight to the waist of the boy in a plain white t-shirt while she rides helmetless in frayed cut-offs and a pink tank top that shows her navel. Be as delicate as a sister plaiting strands of Clairol Nice ‘n Easy #87. Keep the hair from her eyes.

Do not care where she is going. Do not care where she has been. All there is, is this now, with middle-aged strangers watching her as she goes by in the passing lane, riding on a curving shortcut through town that at her age I would have driven out of my way to avoid, as I still do with the twisting caverns of underground parking garages, intersections with obstructed views.

Wind, yes be that sister, please do not be that girl at slumber parties who becomes so engrossed with what Bobby is doing on the re-run of Dallas that she never notices she is knotting and not, as she thinks, braiding her friend’s hair as promised.

Moments like that will come soon enough, I'm not fool enough to believe they won't. Just give her this one day, just give her this one day. 50

Natatorium

I. The Showers

The old women go naked but the young girls leave their suits on. Being neither, I am unsure what to do. With some, staying covered would mean I am ashamed of my body, ashamed of theirs, so I do as they do. With the twenty-somethings it’s different. Do they worry someday their breasts will sag to their waists, keep them hidden now as if to protect them from this thing, this possibly communicable disease called aging? Or is it that they already think their bodies unspeakably grim? More withered and weathered than any of ours, plumper, more stretched-marked, less worthy of the feel of water seeking out the pores of breast and belly?

Sometimes when I am nude, water hitting everything that is me: The scar from when my mother… The boomerang-shaped one from when my brother… And the smiley-faced one that shows when I move away my belly rolls reminding me that what is inside, can always be taken out, I look up from my arm to find all the old women gone and under each showerhead a twenty-one-year-old.

Six goddesses in Speedos squeezing chemical approximations of sweet smelling strawberries onto nylon scrubbing puffs. They look away quickly from my 42Ds. And you can’t put your suit back on once the shower has started.

II. The Pool

The fifty-two year old breast cancer survivor who believes her best chance of remission to be in losing forty pounds doesn’t care about the twenty-year-old in the next lane dominating an eighteen-minute mile with perfect form. We are all focused on ourselves: Strokes slicing the surface, legs flippering behind us, chlorine stinging our eyes when cheap goggles loosen their suction in the middle of a lap. They do not care that I mutter “Be one with the fishy nature. Be one with the fishy nature” as I’m catching my breath between laps. They do not care that my swim cap, always on just slightly wrong, bubbles at the back creating unnecessary drag, slowing me down. No one notices anything.

Saturday Afternoon in a Coffeeshop

It’s funny how the sight of a big breasted brunette can make you think about all you want out of life; How limitless possibility can be. As if somewhere in those D cups is the answer to all you’ve never asked. As if in her slow chewing of a cookie, the grist of the world is ground up, swallowed down as more than nutmeg, flour, and eggs. As if her head bobbing to a twenty-year-old pop song is confirmation to the world that “Yes, you're right, my beauty can and will save you.” As if the shamanistic tattoo on her neck is the mark the world leaves, a chemical ink staining on a palette that would have been exquisite even blank. 53

How Not To Have An Affair

When all you want to do is touch his skin, get a hobby. Knitting is nice, the rhythmic clacking, the touching of soft wool and acrylics can be almost as good.

Better still, take up weaving. When you need him, bend over your loom instead. Shuttle forward, shuttle back, forward, back. Understand how all those hidden erotic scenes got woven into 15th-century tapestries.

Get a baby. There's no way you'll still want to deconstruct his gaze when you have to pump four times a day and you're worried that redness might be mastitis.

Better still, treat him like a baby. When you want to place your fingertips to the softness of his lips or grab the firmness of his ass, inquire about his nutritional intake instead. Remind him to look both ways when crossing streets and to always wear clean underwear (try not to think [too much] about his underwear).

When you are leg to leg with him under the table, wondering who will be the first to move away in this tightly packed bar booth; do not look at your watch, awarding yourself points for every minute you keep his warmth next to yours. This is not some game like you made up in grade school where connecting with another player meant protection from hot lava, crocodiles, or old age. Lasting an hour and a half while nonchalantly talking of Sartre and the space/time continuum gets you nothing 54 but wet. Ignore the way touching his bare arm brings color to places you've long since stopped affecting on your husband: his cheeks, his throat. The way hearing you call his name flutters him even if you only have a question about last month's finance report. The way he looks for your smile across the table after every facile joke he makes at staff meetings.

When you're dancing near him at the club, both of you smelling salty, the heat of his breath pulling you in like magnetized steel: watch him dance for a moment. Notice how his movements are like your husband's still are in your imagination. If he danced, this is how he would dance with hips moving so slightly, hands cupped tight in fists, rhythmically reticent. Notice how this forbidden "he" blocks the other men each time one tries to dance a little too close to you, nonchalantly moving between as if broadcasting that you are his to not fuck, only his to be wanted by. Remember fifteen years ago when your husband still cared enough for these jealousies. This boy here, with his red cheeks and large pale hands, was just turning ten.

And finally, when all of these tricks stop working, because eventually you know they will, what you want are those hands on your breasts and your nose on his neck. When you start making plans for how to get him drunk when your husband's out of town and telling your friends you're no longer attracted to him so they'll stop eyeing you like high school detention monitors watching over bathroom passes at 4:19, when you know in your desires what the small of his back feels like…

Go home and shine your sink like the self-help books say. Organize the spice rack. Scrub the grout with a toothbrush. Try on all your clothes, finally throw out the ones that are too tight. Become one cliché instead of the other, leave him 55

to the single girl his own age with gentle flapper waves in her hair and no back fat showing through her sweater. 56

Fifteen Wild Decembers

I want to date you again. To drive toward the city with snow making halos on street lights always turning green.

I did not know the word Torschlusspanik yet or understand what would necessitate the purchase of a shredder. I had never seen ten years of bank statements, six of mortgage payments. Never had to wonder why life is made up so much of dollars and sense. No one had ever told me that soy lowers sperm count and sugar atrophies ovaries, so is best enjoyed in moderation.

I want to be returned to that night in '94 when your two-door hatchback started to slide toward the median but you went with the skid, gentle pressing to the brake, stopping just short of impact.

Lyotard in LaGuardia (Lines Composed After Reading That Technology Is Taking Over the World)

When flying toward this island I looked up from my book and noticed them, dirty fingerprints on the wings left by some angel, worn out from listening to the flapping sound of its own wings, who hitched a ride with us. Waiting for the return flight, I pick up reading where I left off, but my thoughts can’t beat the back noise of an automated voice above me, breaking in, starting to remind me that my baggage should not be left unattended. Halfway through, the pre-recorded warning is drowned out by a U.S. Air worker two gates away, a flight has been cancelled. Before she tells us which or why, an uneasy toddler, not calmed by his mother’s hush-hushings, covers them all with his wild and unguarded, open-mouthed howl. 58

Daughter of Descartes (Meditations on a Misspent Youth)

1640: Descartes' only daughter dies of scarlet fever at the age of five.

1641: Descartes publishes Meditations in which he writes "since it is now manifest to me that even bodies are not properly speaking known by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the understanding only, and since they are not known from the fact that they are seen or touched, but only because they are understood, I see clearly that there is nothing which is easier for me to know than my mind."

If she had not died at five would I still be where I am today, shadowdancing alone at thirty to the technotronic beats of a beautiful pop-diva-has-been-to-be, both the diva ‘n’ me under the control of an invisible demon, hypnotizing us with hair gel and purses that sparkle with saucer-sized sequins?

Would I still have been caught in my high school Cartesian Circle, where fat girls didn’t get dates because they spent Saturday nights hunched over textbooks because fat girls didn’t get dates?

Would I still stay in this dream where I have chosen the life of the mind over the life of the body and never shake myself awake into a world where one does not control the other, but both stand as a whole to prove I exist?

If I am destined to live by this logic, these fragments of self, I want to know where it’s from, see its bare roots. 59

Had every word been written in the father’s head long before his child’s body was shaken by scarlet fever and he struggled for something to take away the pain? Was it back when he was trapped in the sickbed of his youth, convincing himself that thinking was all that need matter and that his mind could rule this machine that dies a bit each morning?

Or had we all already decided back in the cave or on the cross as the sun was rising in the West that spirit dominates the flesh?

Having It Out With My Fertility

He gets the chance to make them new after each release, a fresh start, while every thing I could ever give has been with me always, came down the birth canal with me, coveted Susie Robinson's crocheted Barbie doll dresses and cried when ET died. Part of every child I could ever bear, has already been to grad school, to McDonalds, to counseling (which hopefully will save them at least a little of their own time on the couch). Every son, every daughter, who could spring from my loins (wait, do women have loins?) has already been sexually harassed, passed over for promotions, jilted by lovers. So which of them wants to step forward, be the lucky gambler of Days 10-14 this month? Which history wants to wait for fresh start and try to come out, feel for itself the changing seasons of the year? 61

Ghost of Zygotes Past

Every month she’ll remind me of all the could-have-beens: The times I was too busy, the times I was too young. The twenty-odd years of eggs flushed down toilets, soaked to tampons. Two hundred and sixty-four children that weren’t and will never be.

Sometimes she shows me each one: June of ’94. Good at math, would have called each Sunday from Tallahassee. September of ’96. Forgetful child, oblivious adult, an egg best left unused. April of ’01. The list goes on. The list goes on. 62

Cropping

First she removes the edges, those useless bits that keep these from being perfectly centered frozen memories: The car poking into the corner, her husband’s foot and leg without torso or head, and her own thumb that only obscured the sky and not that scene from last year when the kids were still young. The one where they gaze up from the ground at a monument to some supposed great man. It is towering granite and magnificent marble permanent, precious like a baby’s first shoes cast in a thin bronze coating. A century from tonight it will still be there in that same spot. With scissors, glued corner holders, some acid-free paper, she can be too.

That Break-Up

Twelve years ago did not go quite as planned.

You were going to get on with your life and I with mine. I didn't know what you would do, hadn't given it much thought. But I, I was going to wear tight black sweaters that came home smelling like a drag from a Marlboro Red and shakin-it-until- two-in-the-morning-even-when-I-have-an-8-am-class-sweat. Do not doubt I was going to bounce from bed to bed: Ralph Rife, Matt Mingus, Adam in my poetry workshop, the lead singer of Our Smiling Jesus Band….then again, who would even need a bed? Cloakroom, classroom, backroom, whatever. It was going to be hot and it was going to be with a lot of people who weren't you. Then after commencement I would go to New York, no, LA, no, Seattle, most definitely Seattle, and live the Literary Life, which I dearly hoped would involve quite a lot more consummation and not so much poor nutrition and constipation as college had. And eventually, I would write a poem about you, my lame college boyfriend who had double meat on his BMTs at Subway, played Björk and Al Di Meola when we were making out in his single dorm room that smelled like coffee and who permed his hair to make it look like Eddie Vedder's. My college boyfriend who stifled me and smothered me with "that's ok"s and "don't worry about it"s when what I really needed was a swift kick in my overly-sensitive depressive ass.

But that's not how it went. We both moped around our respective small towns and I went on two dates with Ralph, you with some bitch named Kelly. And when I saw you that March, all I wanted to do was touch your skin. Not in the hot hot sexy sexy way that I wanted to touch Ralph's, but in the way I reach over and touch you now sometimes when two a.m. comes and I can't sleep for thinking, rolling over toward your warmth to calm me.

And why is one touch more needed than the other? Because I prayed for fourteen years to marry the right person after one of my thrice-married aunts said 64

"Kid, don't end up with losers like I did." And I decided at 19 that you were my answer since some days I want to move to the city but most days I just want to nap on the sofa. 65

caution: do not use with mono devices

This hillbilly stompbox of love is only good in stereo, coming at you from both sides, pulsing left to right. Play me the shopping cart baby be my Eintranzenneubaten of the parking lot while we load the groceries in the trunk. This is not 1992 but I’m still hot for you. I think I’ve found happiness in this sale on organic carrots and the end of the season one dollar clearance on topsoil at the Wal-Mart. I think I’ve found happiness in the way the fog circles these ridges, making Southern Ohio look like Switzerland making clouds look like mountains.

There is happiness on our porch swing reading On the Road watching the dendroica cerulean eat and rest on its way from Canada to the warm winter air of Belize. He is no Kerouac, won't stop off for pie and ice cream when a feeder full of healthy grains is offered. This bird would not call him wild, this bird would know his antics by their scientific name: inconsidertia bullshitia.

So if this quiet country night is a bourgeois slavery then baby, tie me up, tie me down— just don’t forget the safety word.

Sex and Housekeeping

Saturday nights are for the singles, where cleavage shirts meet open bar tabs and the confident ones, like you my dear friend, come prepared: legs shaved, knees moisturized, and condoms stashed bedside. I watch you in the neon light as we are shaking a tailfeather/ giving a witness. You are hoping that after enough pale ales and whiskeys one of these men who sit stoic and watchful but do not dance, will get to see your clean apartment. I envy you their eyes. I cannot tell if it is my nose or my wedding ring that lets me move unwatched, any beauty I've put on unnoticed by strangers.

Or perhaps they can sense your effort, Instinctively they know without knowing: two hours on clothes, and curls, and lashes, three to clean your rented house, putting away pictures of exes and hiding, if not washing, dirty underwear. Everything looks tidy, everything seems neat and clean and right like it never is. And if you touch one just so, while I am away in the bathroom or off dancing with my husband, then perhaps that one will come home with you. And if you use the fingertip to bare forearm trick the magazines list as seven on "Ten Touches to Make Him Stay the Night," you will need to turn up the heat since you keep the thermostat low when there will only be you to notice.

But late Sunday mornings, after whatever one has come home with you has left without breakfast, pulled his car quietly from your drive and your apartment is empty again, your thermostat moved back to 68 as you wonder if he was worth the pennies it cost to have it at 72 for the night, this is when I, oh poor old married one, return to my bed, blind to the laundry baskets full 67

of once-clean clothes that gather more cat fur each day they are not stored out of sight.

We could have stopped, put them in dresser drawers, folded them neatly arm to arm, but I kissed my husband after breakfast instead. Leaving the egg pan unsoaked, kitchen island untidied, last week's fight unsettled. I held his hipbone to mine. I let the warmth of his thigh be enough for me against the coolness of the bedroom air.