On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

Betrothal in B minor

35 Betrothal in B minor All women bewail the betrothal of any woman, beamy-eyed, bedazzled, throwing a fourth finger about like a marionette. Worse than marriage in many ways, an engagement, be it moments or millennia, is a morbid exercise in hope, a mirage, a romance befuddled by magazine photographs of lips, eyebrows, brassieres, B-cups, bromides, bimbos bedaubed with kohl, rouged, bespangled, beaded, beheaded, really, because a woman loses the brain she was born with if she believes for a moment she of all women will escape enslavement of mind, milk, mooring, the machinations of centuries, to arrive in a blissful, benign, borderless Brook Farm where men are uxorious, mooning, bewitched, besotted, bereft of all beastly, beer-guzzling qualities. Oh, no, my dear mademoiselle, marriage is no déjeuner sur l’herbe, no bebop with Little Richard for eternity, no bedazzled buying spree at Bergdorf or Bendel, no clinch on the beach with Burt Lancaster 36 although it is sometimes all these things, it is more often, to quote la Marquise de Merteuil, “War,” but war against the beastliness within that makes us want to behave, eat beets, buy beef at the market, wash with Fab, betray our beautiful minds tending to the personal hygiene of midgets. My God, Beelzebub himself could not have manufactured a more Machiavellian maneuver to bedevil an entire species than this benighted impulse to replicate ourselves ad nauseam in the confines of a prison so perfect bars are redundant. Even in the Bible all that begetting and begatting only led to misery, morbidity, Moses, and murder. I beseech you, my sisters, let’s cease, desist, refrain, take a breather, but no one can because we are driven by tiny electrical sparks that bewilder, befog, beguile, becloud our angelic intellect. Besieged by hormones, we are stalked by a disease unnamed, a romantic glaucoma. We are doomed to die, bespattered and besmirched beneath the dirt, 37 under the pinks and pansies of domestic domination. Oh, how I loathe you—perfect curtains, exquisite chairs, crème brûlée of my dreams. Great gods of pyromania, begrudge not your handmaiden, your fool, the flames that fall from your fiery sky, for my dress is tattered and my shoes are different colors, blue and red. ...