You Drive Me Crazy (3 page)

(Whom their imputed grace will dignifie)

Must see reveal'd. Then since that I may know;

As liberally, as to a Midwife shew

Thy self: cast all, yea, this white lynnen hence,

There is no pennance, much less innocence:

To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering then a man.

JOHN DONNE

The Shipfitter's Wife

I loved him most

when he came home from work,

his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,

his denim shirt ringed with sweat,

smelling of salt, the drying weeds

of the ocean. I'd go to where he sat

on the edge of the bed, his forehead

anointed with grease, his cracked hands

jammed between his thighs, and unlace

the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles

and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.

Then I'd open his clothes and take

the whole day inside me—the ship's

gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,

the voice of the foreman clanging

off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead

kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,

the white fire of the torch, the whistle,

and the long drive home.

DORIANNE LAUX

I Want

to shove my clothes

to one side of the closet,

give you the bigger half.

Quietly I'll hide most of my shoes,

so you won't know I have this many.

I will

rearrange furniture to add more,

find space on my shelves

for your many books,

nail up the placard that says

poets do it, and redo it, and do it again.

I want

to share a laundry basket,

get our clothes mixed up,

wait for the yelling

when my reds run wild

into your whites

turning them a luscious pink,

your favorite color of me.

I will

move my pillow

to the other side of the bed,

lay yours next to mine,

your scent on the fabric

always near me,

even on nights you're away.

I will

buy a new bureau to hold your

thousand and one black socks,

find a place for all those work boots,

the ones I refer to as big and ugly.

I want

more pots and pans to wash,

piles of them leaning high

from late night meals

cooked naked and drunk,

red wine pouring into

a sauce of simmering

tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil,

kisses bitten between bites,

and platefuls of our late hours,

stacking up into dawn.

I want

to stock cupboards, closets, and pantry,

fill the house with us.

I want to gain weight with you because our love, our love makes me fat.

KIM KONOPKA

Stability

W
HEN
L
OVE
R
OLLS

H
ere's what happens after you've soared to the heights of ecstasy: You fall back to earth with a jolt, landing in the muck of monotony, uncertainty, or misery. Your once glorious relationship now seems boring, disturbing, or downright disastrous.

Unless…you drift gently down (using your nifty “mutual commitment” parachute) into the cozy nest of stability, where you and your partner share a Pottery Barn–perfect little life. Okay, maybe it's more of a Target toasty little life, but the point is, you find yourself secure and content in a trusting, loving relationship. Good-bye to the heart-thumping drama of ecstasy. Hello to stability, the couch-potato stage of love, where excitement comes in the form of doing the nightly crossword puzzle, watching the latest
Fear Factor
episode, or trying out the new Crock-Pot.

Or perhaps you're sipping herbal tea together, like the couple in Katherine Mansfield's “Camomile Tea.” And guess what? It's fun! You love it! There's no place you'd rather be. In fact, you feel positively smug about this happy domesticity. “We might be fifty, we might be five,/So snug, so compact, so wise are we!” you trill to yourself, like the speaker in Mansfield's poem. Maybe you're not burning up the bedroom the way you once did, but you still have your homey moments of desire: “Under the kitchen-table leg/My knee is pressing against his knee.”

What's more important, you think, is that you feel happily mated for life, like the couple in Donald Hall's “Valentine.” True, the speaker compares himself and his partner to a bunch of decidedly unglamorous animals—pudgy chipmunks, screeching bluebirds, and lumbering bears, all of them driven by biological need rather than romance—but his valentine brims with pure, playful love: “Hoptoads hop, but/Hogs are fatter./Nothing else but/Us can matter.”

Besides, maybe you are fatter or plainer or more worn than the romantic ideal of, say, a Brad Pitt or a Halle Berry, but in stability you don't really care. Your partner adores you anyway, you're sure of it, just as you find his snoring a comfort instead of an annoyance. Together you're building a home, maybe a family, so there's less time for workouts and beauty sleep. Sure, his six-pack abs were hot back in the day, but to you he looks more gorgeous now—bleary-eyed and unshaven, in a tattered fleece robe, reading the Sunday papers with you or rocking the baby back to sleep. To you, he's a prince, like Henry V, who woos the princess Katherine by telling her that he may not be the most handsome (his “face is not worth sun-burning”), he may not be the most witty or glib (unlike those “fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours”), but he does have a “good heart” (which is steady like the sun, “for it shines bright and never changes”).

Of course, you need to watch it in stability—you can get so comfortable with each other, so familiar, that you're unaware of things like (a) gradually grossing out your partner by becoming a real slob, and (b) hurting your partner's feelings by saying she/he is a real slob but you love him/her anyway. Case in point: the mistress in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. She's no supermodel, with her wiry hair, pasty complexion, and breath that “reeks.” Still, her lover declares: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare.” Maybe the mistress needs to pay a little more attention to her hygiene. And maybe the speaker needs to learn how
not
to tell his partner he loves her. Using eight lines to detail her thorough lack of grace and beauty, then sneaking in two lines about how he loves her anyway, isn't going to cut it. “You stink, but I love you, you huge pile of dough,” is all she's going to hear.

No matter how long you've been together or how well you think you know each other, you still need to romance your partner, especially in stability. Don't run off and get an extreme makeover or buy into the whole red-roses-and-champagne bit. Instead, try being kind, receptive, and respectful, practicing what Henry V would call “plain and uncoined constancy.” You simply need to show your partner, often and in whatever tender, goofy way you both understand, that his or her heart is your home and that you plan to be there permanently. Like the speaker in Mark Doty's “To the Engraver of My Skin” (who is getting a tattoo), you've signed up “for whatever comes” in the relationship, even if it hurts. You want your partner to know “I'm here/for revision, discoloration; here to fade/and last.”

That long-term, written-on-the-heart commitment is what keeps stability stable, at least for as long as both partners can honor it. While it lasts, this kind of love provides real comfort, a safe haven from the things we all fear, like loneliness and loss. If you're lucky enough to experience stability, you tend to want to cling to it, hoping it will protect you from what the speaker in Etheridge Knight's “A Love Poem” calls “the cyclops” who “peers into my cave.” Like the frostbitten houses in Donald Hall's “The Hunkering,” you want to “tighten [yourself] for darkness and/hunker down” in the warmth of your relationship.

Still, in order to live fully in stability, you need to accept that even this secure love could be dashed any second. One of you could fall out of love. One of you could get sick. The whole world could go kerflooey. And somehow you need not to be a nervous wreck about it all—pretty hard when you're as content as you've ever been in your life.

One solution is to try the strategy of the speaker in Linda Pastan's “An Early Afterlife.” “Why don't we say goodbye right now,” she asks her lover, “before whatever is going to happen/happens.” In other words, why not live as if every day might be the last? Not weeping with melodrama, but living gratefully and gracefully, trying to “use the loving words/we otherwise might not have time to say.” That way, “we would bask/in an early afterlife of ordinary days, impervious to the inclement weather/already in our long-range forecast./Nothing could touch us. We'd never/have to say goodbye again.”

A lovely solution and definitely worth a try, but given the reality of long days and short tempers, it's one that few couples can master. Every time we think we're going to live this day as if it's our last, full of love and goodwill, the washing machine breaks or our partner wants to watch the big game on the night we're dying to see the Oscars, or something equally stupid happens that makes us act peevish and jerky. And as soon as we snap at our mate or stomp off in a snit, we remember: Oh, hell, I was supposed to be living this day as if it were my last.

Perhaps the key to preserving stability, that cozy and warm stage of love (despite the snapping and snits), is to stop worrying about preserving it. Of course you can't hold love still—things will change in your relationship over time, for good and bad. But you still can thrill to moments like the one described in Elizabeth Bishop's “It Is Marvellous…,” when you're safely content despite being on the edge of danger, when you're stable but in flux at the same time:

It is marvellous to wake up together

At the same minute; marvellous to hear

The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,

To feel the air clear

As if electricity had passed through it

From a black mesh of wires in the sky.

All over the roof the rain hisses,

And below, the light falling of kisses.

There's something ominous about that hissing rain and the black mesh of wires hanging over the house, but there's also joy in the sound of the rain on the roof, in the suddenly clear air and the kisses exchanged in the snug bedroom. We're lucky to have it this good, all of us who are happy in love. We get to revel in moments, days, maybe years of the marvelous, with fair warning that

Without surprise

The world might change to something quite different,

As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,

Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Camomile Tea

Outside the sky is light with stars;

There's a hollow roaring from the sea.

And, alas! for the little almond flowers,

The wind is shaking the almond tree.

How little I thought, a year ago,

In that horrible cottage upon the Lee

That he and I should be sitting so

And sipping a cup of camomile tea!

Light as feathers the witches fly,

The horn of the moon is plain to see;

By a firefly under a jonquil flower

A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.

We might be fifty, we might be five,

So snug, so compact, so wise are we!

Under the kitchen-table leg

My knee is pressing against his knee.

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,

The tap is dripping peacefully;

The saucepan shadows on the wall

Are black and round and plain to see.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Valentine

Chipmunks jump, and

Greensnakes slither.

Rather burst than

Not be with her.

Bluebirds fight, but

Bears are stronger.

We've got fifty

Years or longer.

Hoptoads hop, but

Hogs are fatter.

Nothing else but

Us can matter.

DONALD HALL

Henry V
V. II. 146–68

If thou canst love a fellow of this temper, Kate, whose face is not worth sun-burning, that never looks in his glass for love of anything he sees there, let thine eye be thy cook. I speak to thee plain soldier: if thou canst love me for this, take me; if not, so say to thee that I shall die is true,—but for thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee too. And while thou livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do always reason themselves out again. What! a speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon,—for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

To the Engraver of My Skin

I understand the pact is mortal,

agree to bear this permanence.