Sample Poems by Cathleen Calbert
Marriage
Can love conquer time or TV?
Mutability? Matrimony?
Should we divorce
and live in sin? Of course,
I shouldn't even have sex
with a man. We ought to leave
the sword between us that divides
my seventy-nine cents from your dollar,
my glass ceiling from your CEO,
and all the U.S. presidents from my big fat zero.
But I wanted ceremony (you too),
so the old-fashioned blood work
to shelter imaginary children
and the ridiculous visual check
to see if we're stricken with VD
or packing the proper equipment
(you go out, I go in),
then figs in cream and flute-playing,
hitched by my Scientology minister of a sister,
vows carried away on your parents' breeze.
Beginning with rites like these,
our union is doomed, don't you think?
Seriously, can one ever hope
for better than serial monogamy?
Still, we're able to conjure lust
occasionally as affectionate equals
although you rarely do the dishes
(or dust or vacuum), and, I confess,
you're the one I'm rudest to.
Does this sum up something?
What can I say in the twenty-first century?
How dare I try to find the words?
Yet you are my Rockefeller grant, darling,
NEA, Guggenheim, and Whiting.
Ah, love, let us be
happy together, so happy together.
Let me not admit . . . Let me count . . .
Love me two times, baby.
Love me tender.
I am your wife and friend.
Liar
He's the false spring,
citrine, slippery
elm, balsam fir,
sleek underside of leaves,
smoothness of toadstools,
oil-spill rainbow,
black ice, honeysucker,
forked tongue
(white man speaks).
And the truth?
What is the truth?
Tumbleweeds.
Unpolished glass.
The truth is an answer
that flattens the horizon.
It's ruin, destruction,
the end of a honeymoon
cottage of a house.
Lies light up that house.
They spice the swordfish
and chill the wine.
They make for a fine evening.
At Six A.M. a White Cat Can Be a Phone
Almost one. It's time
to go to bed again, so run
through these rented rooms,
flicking them into darkness.
Half past three. The moon
won't lift her weary head.
Let Miss Kitty sleep.
Stay sweating in bed until ten.
Turn on The Wheel of Fortune
or Jeopardy and begin to sing,
I checked the mail, I checked the mail,
I've already checked the goddamned mail.
There's never anything
although you wait for the letter
your mother hoped to receive:
Please come home. All's forgiven.
Evade an anxious afternoon
by visualizing the blind girl
you took under your wing,
patting Thor the Labrador
until she told you to knock it off.
Look, you're not supposed to pet him.
She dismissed your pity, didn't she?
They say "glaucoma," you go on living.
Spend the evening thinking
over what your ex said:
I wish I could meet someone
who had something wrong with them.
If she was blind or paralyzed,
you don't know how kind I could be.
As things stand, you can stay up late,
drinking black coffee with chicory
and making daisy chains with the names
of the girls he's teaching.
Zoe and Chloe and Anna and Hannah.
It's like a refrain! A kind of game!
Blind Man's Bluff. Billy Goat Gruff.
Zoe and Chloe and Anna and Hannah.
Let him be. He'll do the best he can.
That's all you can ask of anyone.
Forget those useless memories
of ruined relationships and days of TV.
Choke on so much loneliness
that you think you can't breathe.
Read the Braille of your own body.
Then go on living alone.