Pome
Another one, another one! This one arrived via sparrow and was dropped lovingly through our mail slot. We thank whomever it was that sent it off on the wind and towards our most unwelcome door. Were we to hazard a guess (and we hate hazards and guesses of all kinds) we'd place this "piece" in the box of the writer's heart marked sentimental. Of course, we have little time for such preposterous notions as this, abiding firmly to the views set out by Wilde ("a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.") Luckily enough for us, and the clumsy young fool who wrote this exasperating treatise on maturity, we appreciate thieves and thieving, and sometimes that luxury is doubly sweet when the emotion is stolen.
A GIRL IN 1941 WITH NO WAIST AT ALL
“Christ,” she says to herself at night
“what an injustice
to have been born plain.”
She finds comfort
among the books piled high;
she’ll read herself to death
instead of starve
She never wore makeup
accepted kisses
opened her fragile hands
or returned the pressing affections
of another pair of arms.
Instead she tries desperately
to find worth in the purity
of her unsmeared, unchipped
little porcelain teacups
that collect her youth in small wasted drops
Her room is clean
Her chores are done
Her hand shakes as she holds
a letter with a threeyearold postmark;
the same return address as the rest in the box
She knows he is trying to break in
She knows she isn’t worth the fight
but still
she wants to be
“Christ,” she says to herself at night
She always falls asleep:
before picking up the scattered envelopes
after locking all the doors
before smiling at the ceiling
after drying her cheeks on such a mocking pillow.
She wakes unalone/warm and breathing
with the same frown
at the faithful clutter of his
“Always yours,”s
“Sincerely,”s
“All My Heart,”s
along the bedside in piles
--------------------------------------------------------
A note is scrawled on the reverse of the looseleaf sheet explaining something about the title being someone else's title which prompted some character to grow and form and dance on his brain, etc etc etc. At this point we do wish to demand, strictly, that anyone sending anything to us: just mail the thing, do not send the explanation of the thing as well (we like our magic to be magical, after all!) How the title came to be pinned to this poem, and whether or not the title was already pinned by someone else to something else, well, those are issues for the scholars and analysts to separate.
