The poem describes a woman alone in her house late at night reminiscing about being left out as a teenager. She eats baby lima beans straight from the pot while walking around and talking to herself. She reflects on the absence of God and presence of silence. Outside, she hears sirens as someone has been hit by a car. The second poem expresses the speaker's desire to enter the other's dreams and protect them from fears to gently return them to their sleeping body.
The poem describes a woman alone in her house late at night reminiscing about being left out as a teenager. She eats baby lima beans straight from the pot while walking around and talking to herself. She reflects on the absence of God and presence of silence. Outside, she hears sirens as someone has been hit by a car. The second poem expresses the speaker's desire to enter the other's dreams and protect them from fears to gently return them to their sleeping body.
The poem describes a woman alone in her house late at night reminiscing about being left out as a teenager. She eats baby lima beans straight from the pot while walking around and talking to herself. She reflects on the absence of God and presence of silence. Outside, she hears sirens as someone has been hit by a car. The second poem expresses the speaker's desire to enter the other's dreams and protect them from fears to gently return them to their sleeping body.
alone in your house. It's two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it's baby lima beans. It's necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You'd be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now. Outside there are sirens. Someone's been run over. The century grinds on Variation on the Word Sleep I would like to watch you sleeping. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun and three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary