Here's a poem.
I read a lot of poems sometimes about people.
It seems that when I get around people, things go wrong.
They may only go wrong in me.
But sometimes they get out of hand.
And they even go wrong for the other people.
I don't think I'm the immediate cause.
I just happened to be there when it's happening.
And this was a poem that originally had dedication.
It was for a girl that I knew, whose marriage
seemed to have broken up.
And so I dedicated the poem to her.
Wrong move.
Never dedicate a poem to someone under those circumstances
I was trying to get out from the outside anyway.
I was trying to feel whatever it was that she was feeling.
And what eventually happened was I just did it
and let her do all the talking.
There was no way to talk about it.
It seemed to me the only thing that I could have happened
if I was going to get to it at all
was let her say whatever she had on her mind.
So the poem is called The Deserted Wife.
It has no dedication.
And a woman speaks in it.
Imagine my voice a little higher.
Thumbing his magazine he is the stranger, I was warned of.
I glance up at the clock.
The door to the bedroom stands ajar.
I try to go on reading as the dark settles
in the branches of the apple tree.
I know what he expects.
Someone to lie beneath him groaning.
How can I leave this house that means so little to me?
How could I fail to gather up its dust, who
should take care be neat, and clean, and mind the way
she walks as the sisters taught us.
I must have been a child a long time.
How could I believe the women I saw
clutching bags of groceries in the street
could be quickened by love?
How neat and clean.
My mind was like a sewing drawer in which the scissors
and needles have their place and lie there ready to be used.
I read.
I try to read.
I feel the faces of cruel children staring at me.
I need my father I think.
I need to feel him shake and lift me in his arms.
I heard you scream, he says.
It's all right now.
A dream, a bad dream.
It's over.
But I do not wake.