Ellen Adair Glassie
Unrequited

I will tell you.
                            The person I love
will only meet me at certain hours
when there are others present.
She set out the date when our
affair will end: then she will not come back.
Sometimes she doesn’t show up anyway,
maybe because I’ve taken her for granted,
and my lone hands are left to play
like puppets with each other.

She is hard-won, her rabbit eyes watching
and her heart at a violet-high frequency.
After weeks of squatting still and collecting
her actions and gestures, collecting my love,
then she’ll inch out of the ring of the leaves.

But once she loves me, it is more God
than anything else found below heaven’s eaves.

I am afraid to explain precisely how much
of a visiting spirit, an Other, she is.
I fear that you’ll think I’m mad or pretentious
when I say she descends like a goddess.

The hard part is that as soon as we’re we
we are I. And we’ve both had many lovers.
The hard part is also that she has no body
of her own. At the end, there’s no way to hug her.

And the hard part is she is always
always the one to leave, apologetically
taking her words and her clothes, shrugging,
smiling like It’s Not You, It’s Me.

And me pleading, No no don’t leave
me with this sole self, the husk of us.

To someone else it must seem as unrequited
as both Echo and Narcissus for Narcissus.

To an outsider, my love must seem the same
as all those painful girlish years I spent,
umbrella-awkward, body bent,
kissing doorframes.

Life's a Colander

Yet in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love
And lack not to lose still.
                        -Helena, All's Well That Ends Well

I've recently been thinking of the way
All's Well 's Helena compares herself
To kitchen implements, because sometimes
When I look at you my sternum smarts
With an unromantic sledgehammerlike slam,
Or a pricking like the notching-in of nails.
If these sensations were not palpable,
I'd pick lighter metaphors than tools.
But carpentry's the best comparison.
Sometimes affection hits us like a pan.

And always, it seems, life's a colander.
I've repeated this poem's epigraph
In dozens of auditions, as I kneel
And pray in this same way and saying this,
And every time a genuine emotion
Pours through the little holes in o's and e's,
The sieve of Shakespeare never filling, too.
For in the end, I ride the gyroscope
Of this crazy stage-dependent life
Because I have a surfeit of my self,
And must dispense with all of it somehow.
This excess abundance is the reigning star
Of all I do, my too-much way of writing,
The bodily requirement that I make
More than one person from my single form,
And the atomic way my rib-bomb detonates.

<< Back to Issue 15, 2012