A honey-voiced old woman wrung me with rage last winter,
Severe Lady, by slandering you. She presumed to use
Your name familiarly-"Pure Poetry"-.
My God! Pure! As if she'd never heard you sleep
With the best men of the age, any age, and at your pleasure.
As if you were a cloudy-eyed girl made happy with gingerale and kisses.
Men understand this-how you are a woman excellent beyond
Their understanding, though you loosen your garments
For them. Lust, they bring. Poverty. Labor. Sorrow.
Their best hours. Yours is the hard service. For you, Lady,
They leave us, and so be it, not one of us your equal.
They take you when you'll have them, with a prayer, that this
Sweet lay be not the last. But you go where you will.
You choose a lover as I do, say for the irrelevant line
Of light that falls across his shoulders, say for the way
He dances at work. You come and shut the door and stay
For days, and ravish him with any trick he names,
For the beauty of it, easy as water in his shaping hands.
Or for another you come as an angel crowned with stars,
And he listens for the soft brush and lift of your wings in his room
As he labors to find the unyielding rhythms and words of praise
For you, inexpressible near him. To another you are a wife,
Predictable as food. To some you give lines like kisses
That come to nothing; you pass out of sight as they turn to follow you.
To another you so open body and bone one deep night
Studded with stars he imagines he has you, Exalted Muse,
Tame as a housebroken cat. Handsome he rises from you
To comb his beard in the staring mirror. The pretty strut
Of the man, oh Excellent Lady, and the stupid fact of his face
With all those teeth when he finds you've gone, really gone,
Leaving wrinkles, a stained hollow in the bed, and that single poem.
Others, fewer, left you whom you wanted. It's hard
For me to imagine you stirred by contained desire,
Waiting for someone to come back who spent all your monies and left,
Years ago, without words, and God! not even caring. But left.
As you choose, so can he. He can't be held to your will
Against his own. He has his private irrelevancies
And he's not interested. This loss happens even to you.
Yet you're apart. Slander cannot come near you. The rage
I harbored is comforted even by your inaccessible distance.
My anger changes. The terms are always yours. The price
Is hard. Severe Lady, exemplar of women,
Whom I serve, I cannot court. I have a prayer:
Keep me in luck, in love, in poems. And keep me honest.