This is called The History of My Feeling
and it's one of the poems I wrote
when I was living in Portland.
I was teaching at Reed College for a year.
And it was a pretty dark time for me,
but it just rained constantly.
I read a poem to one of the workshops
this afternoon that I wrote in February after it had literally
been raining every day since--
well, John and Barbara were there that same year.
They can vouch for it.
It had been raining since September.
Or if the water wasn't literally collecting in the air,
it was hanging in this large gray thing over the city.
Anyway, so all of my poems that I wrote,
they had rain in them, literally, as does this.
And this also goes back to Iowa City,
where I had been teaching the year before.
It's called The History of My Feeling.
The history of my feeling for you or is it
the way you change and are blameless like clouds?
Reminds me of the sky in Portland
and the morning I unpacked and found the white plates
from Iowa City broken, consistently
surprising with cracks.
Petals like new math theories smashed
with the purposeful fingers of chance.
I love the plates.
They were remnants from an auction which still goes on
in my head because of the auctioneer's body
and his sexy insinuations about the goods he was selling.
But to Ruth, who talked them into their thin wraps
of newspaper, what we were sharing
was departure and two lives breaking and learning
to mend into new forms.
We had loved our husbands, torn our bodies in classic ways
to bear children, Sammy, David, Wesley.
Now we love new men and wept together
so that the plates weren't important
and hadn't been packed with the care I might
have given had I been alone.
But Ruth was with me.
You were gone like this storm that's
been arriving and disappearing all morning.
I awoke to hear heavy rain in the gutters.
The light was uncertain and my feelings had grown less sure.
Last night, pinned by a shaft of pain, your presence
and your absence.
I knew clearly that I hated you for entering me profoundly,
for taking me inside you, for husbanding me, claiming all
that I knew and did not know, yet
letting me go from you into this unpredictable and loneliest
of weathers.