For the Girl from West Orange
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- For the Girl from West Orange
Last week a blonde in a strapless dress stirred in me something merciless—
her mane of hair in a suicide knot, eyes an opal that could not be bought.
How I longed to be at that unknowing age when love is never average,
when life unrolls like the Amazon, when there is nothing that can’t be undone.
I felt the old anger for a while, recalling your nervous seventies smile,
the vacant weekends of desire, Mondays of phosphorescent fire.
How many times, over the years, did I mean to call, despite the fear
that what you said could not be unsaid? A stranger told me you were dead.
There were still things I wanted to say. Not even our silences could be halfway.
[i.m. Mary Lambdin, 1952–2012] [End Page 172]
William Logan’s most recent book of poems, Madame X, was published by Penguin in 2012. He received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry last spring. His next book of criticism, Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure, will be published by Columbia University Press in Spring 2014.
