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Seattle, Third and Pike
After my reading, on the night-gleaming street belonging to the drunk and belligerent, I a woman was left. The woman I loved turned her face away and then followed her nose up the steep cross-street, refusing angrily. Later, in the flourescent ferry-waiting room, she left again when I sat beside her. Nonetheless, I had to drive her home. Before she left again she sat on the side of my bed. After, there were phone calls across the continent while I grew sicker and sicker still. Then I refused. “Desperately” is an adverb accurate enough for two. That was in spring. Now, fall. Such damage, overall. I’ve used it, I find, to scale, rescind, un-limn, unleaf myself. A difficult transformation from limbed, finned, to indeterminate: something again embryonic, that dependent, skinned and inarticulate, in form a worm, a Daphne’s broken limb. . . . Where before I could swim (and always did, fiercely up), now I am at the mercy of the merciful tide’s doubling dream of Never-arrive when Arrive was ever the stream I climbed, christened mine and home by something in my blood. Unable, now, my self to move, past agreeing with the scheme, in an ocean, I am a stream that was, that never wanted what it was: Good. So I have willed my unwilling, violently. Blood’s apology’s blood. My testament: to your No my Yes; to your Gone, my Left: through a glass oppositely. Busily. So. Still, the wish for congruency. For some other to come to know.
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Liz Waldner’s most recent books of poetry are Self and Simulacra, Dark Would (the missing person), and Etym(bi)ology.
Originally published in the April/May 2003 issue of Boston Review
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