The Cold Inclusive

Should you revisit us,
Stay a little longer,
And get to know the place.
Experience hunger,
Madness, disease and war.
You heard about them, true,
The last time you came here;
It’s different having them.
And what about a go
At love, marriage, children?
All good, but bringing some
Risk of remorse and pain
And fear of an odd sort:
A sort one should, again,
Feel, not just hear about,
To be qualified as
A human-race expert.
On local life, we trust
The resident witness,
Not the royal tourist.

People have suffered worse
And more durable wrongs
Than you did on that cross
(I know–you won’t get me
Up on one of those things),
Without sure prospect of
Ascending good as new
On the third day, without
“I die, but man shall live”
As a nice cheering thought.
So, next time, come off it,
And get some service in,
Jack, long before you start
Laying down the old law:
If you still want to then.
Tell your dad that from me.

–Donald Davie

(Happy Easter, everyone!)

She juliets him from a window in Soho,
A “business girl” of twenty.
He is a florid businesman of fifty.
(Their business is soon done.)

He, of a bright young man the sensual ghost,
Still (in his mind) the gay seducer,
Takes no account of thinned and greying hair,
The red veins webbing a once-noble nose,
The bushy eyebrows, wrinkles by the ears,
Bad breath, the thickening corpulence,
The faded, bloodshot eye.

This is his dream: that he is still attractive.

She, of a fashionable bosom proud,
A hairstyle changing as the fashions change,
Has still the ageless charm of being young,
Fancies herself and knows that men are mugs.

Her dream: that she has foxed the bloody world.

When two illustions meet, let there not be a third
Of the gentle hypocrite reader prone to think
That he is wiser than these self-deceivers.

Such dreams are common. Readers have them too.

Forty Something

She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me,
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”

–Robert Hass

Variations On A Theme By Woody Allen

The heart wants what it wants.
–as quoted in Time.

The heart gets what it gets. Notwithstanding
all the mornings, waking with a yen

for nectar and ambrosia, a wedding bower
flush with all the pleasures of imaginable

heaven. No midnight pickle run
relieves the fitful hunger of the gravid

man, whose heart wants what it wants. Nor can
devotion, mined from the years

of daily pressure like some gem, indemnify
against the sudden Stepford husband

ralphing on a yellowed covenant. To wit:
there is no logic to these things. And yet

the icepick idles in the drawer, strings skitter
and careen, a frenzy takes the ardent

moviegoer: oh sweet cakes, meatloaf, dear…
The heart’s a mouth, and fuck its reasons.

–Rachel Loden