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Editor's
Note
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Three
Poems
by
Len Krisak
The
Story of the Other Woman
We
sat that night, there at her kitchen table,
Listening. I
watched my spell-bound wife,
Who looked down, fiddling with
her butter knife;
Not showing, in so far as she was
able,
Any sign that might expose the way
The
woman’s calm recital made her feel.
I had no doubt the
tale told there was real:
That not so many years ago, she
lay
Wide open for a shy young man she let
Play
with her body “like some sand-box toy.”
She’d
pitied him as if he were a boy;
A pupil she felt sorry for;
a pet.
That’s when the silence came—the
awkward pause
Of third-rate-fiction fame . . . until she
swept
Her arm in sharing gesture, and a goblet leapt
To
trace an arc. By physics’ iron laws,
It smashed
to flindered shards—to little bits
Of what had lent
warm claret lees the shape
A cratered pond might take. Her
mouth agape,
My wife stood up, and by brief starts and fits
We exited the story I am telling
You. We failed to
show much grace in going,
But what would you expect? We left
her knowing
Only vaguely what she had been selling,
The
other woman. If you read ahead
Though, right between the
lines, you will have guessed
Which one of us soon bought . .
. and all the rest,
Including that it had been no cheap red
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Shits
Passing in the Night
Who
wouldn’t want . . . I mean, who wouldn’t love
Some
way to keep alive the memory of
A seedy, soul-demeaning
irony
Like this (which needs some sordid imagery
To
drive it home): a country highway just
As dusk comes on; a
core of shabby lust;
A husband driving from her house (and
his)
One day a month, as regular as is
The other man
(besotted) driving toward
The
self-same house whose master is not lord.
And down
this rut-filled road, their Volvos pass.
One races toward
her for a piece of ass
That makes him think of Plato,
Petrarch, Dante;
The other, though, is hardly Patrick
Bronte.
For in this wuthering town like Haworth, York,
Where
hubby has—once more—pulled out his cork,
He is
already always un-protective
Of a wife whose troth has
proved defective.
Which means it’s safe to pass
him on the road,
Not one mile from that couple’s
quaint abode.
And every month, they cut it ever-closer
As
the cuckoo’s work grows ever-grosser—
Ever more
flagrant—till . . . Her appetite
Grows
cloyed—eight years, to get their numbers right—
And
all stove-in, like Usher’s house of cards,
The
rank affair lies middened in its shards.
Who wouldn’t
savor irony like this,
Though it’s been thirty years
since their last kiss?
Yes, why not wallow in the memory,
though
The dupe and cunt—and prick—died long
ago?
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“The
More You Cross It Out, the More It's Here”
—“X,”
from Richard Wilbur’s The
Disappearing Alphabet
Dream-shaken
still;
At 3 a.m.,
awakened
Far too often.
Do what I will,
Ice-blue
irises will soften
To grey, the ache in
How they
melt.
And then the thin lips part
As if to speak.
What
has she felt?
Why do my knees go weak?
Where is her
carved-out heart?
Why, when I claw from sleep,
Does every nerve feel stricken
And the pulse die
feebly as
The day begins—a prison-keep
Where
nothing dead can quicken
Because it never has?
Again,
again, again: the act
Goes on. She will not quit;
He
can’t defend.
Again, again, again: that
fact,
Alone and naked, argues it
Will never end.
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