Living For Two - Denise Levertov

Lily Bloom, what ominous fallen crowfeathers of shadow
the nightlight scattered around your outspread hair
on feverish cumulus of pillows—
demonic darkness, hair, feathers, jabs of greenish
sickroom light.
                        And your sallow face, long, lost, lonely,
O Lily Bloom, dying,
                        looked into mine those nights,
searching, equine, for life to be lived—
but not believing, Believing yourself fit for the knacker's yard...

What I told you—promised you—
though I meant it, didn't make sense:
Friendship, Life of Art, Love of Nature.
You had no correlatives, I had
no holiness.
You saved me the exact shame of not coming across. But Lily—
whom I remember not in my head (or barely once a year)
but in my nerves—what brimming measure of living
your death exacts from me! And when the fire of me smokes
or gasps as flames will do when a contending element
chokes their utterance, and they burn livid instead of red,

then I know I am cheating you. Living this half-life in my
                                                                              fiftieth year
cheats you. If I can't give you water, give myself
water, then I must give you, give myself, some icy spirits,
diamonds on the tongue,
                                        to sear cracked lips and
                                        quicken the heart: a ceremony

of living
Love, lovers, husband, child, land and ocean, struggle and solitude:
you've had these, and more, but you need more.

                                       We have other years
to go, Lily. I thrist too.
                                    We're not free
of our covenant, Enemy, Burden, Friend.



[From:
Levertov, D. (1975) The freeing of the dust. New York: New Directions, p57 - p58]



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Martha - Audre Lorde

Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evi...
Read more

Vespers - Louise Glück (from Wild Iris)

You thought we didn't know. But we knew once, children know these things. Don't turn away now—           we inhabited a lie to appease you. I remember sunlight of early spring, embankments netted with dark vinca. I remember lying in a field, touching my brother's body. Don't turn away now; we denied memory to console you. We mimicked you, reciting the terms of our punishment. I remember some of it, not all of it: deceit begins as forgetting. I remember small things, flowers growing under the hawthorn tree, bells of the wild scilla. Not all, but enough to know you exist: who else had reason to create mistrust between a brother and sister but the one who profited, to whom we turned in solitude? Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth but heaven we were losing? [From: Glück, L. (1992) The Wild Iris . Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, p44]
Read more

To My Daughter The Junkie On A Train - Audre Lorde

Children we have not borne bedevil us by becoming themselves painfully sharp and unavoidable like a needle in our flesh. Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting of minds committed like murder or suicide to their own private struggle a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain slumps down beside me begging to be ridden asleep for the price of a midnight train free from desire. Little girl on the nod if we are measured by the dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons. My corrupt concern will not replace what you once needed but I am locked into my own addictions and offer you my help, one eye out for my own station. Roused and deprived your costly dream explodes into a terrible technicoloured laughter at my failure up and down across the aisle women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became usel...
Read more