You Drive Me Crazy (5 page)

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

W
HEN
L
OVE
K
EEPS
Y
OU
G
UESSING

W
e 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.