The next poem I'm going to read is The Tarnished,
and it's for Roger Bowen, who gave me the idea.
I was writing this series of angel poems
and realized I had to take angel off all these poems.
But anyway, I left one that at least had Gypsy Angel,
and I kept one called The Tarnished.
And I had this marvelous idea, because I
had to think of something, to take it
from John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman,
largely because the woman there is so fascinating,
and to use one of Steve Orlen's lines,
and if I don't say it correctly, I hope he forgives me.
Something about we're in love with the need for fictions
or whatever.
If I didn't say it right, you need to buy the book anyway.
So I don't have to worry about it.
But there's that sense that we all
seem to fall in love with a need for fictions, or in some cases
we are in love with our own fictions anyway.
Anyway, it's spoken from her, as if I kind of took her out
of the book and had her speak by herself, as if she isn't
doing it in the book already.
There's an epigraph.
I knew of no other way to break out of what I was.
Each day when I walk down to the wharf,
some think I wait for my lover to return,
but I just stare into the days, a legend, no longer human.
Others believe I will burst into flames from sin
or jump off a cliff to lie insignificant
on the sea's quiet floor.
Men call me whore.
Ladies whisper behind my back, pretending lust
belongs only to men.
At night, I know they dream about sailors,
green islands, the bright hooks in fishermen's smiles.
I share my penance with no one, not even God.
My reward.
Some nights I comfort the maid while she
cries herself to sleep, kiss the poor wings
folded down her back.
She knows that man is like the sea, a boy who leaves
a white coat at your feet.