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She Knows
A storm is coming, I can hear the thunder in the distance. It is
night.
It is impossible to know what is inside another person
but when she tells you she feels like she is living alone
and later that she feels like a single parent
you can get a clue. That's what my wife told me tonight.
Now I'm supposed to sit here and write a poem about it.
That's the assignment if you're a poet.
Let your life get bad enough that you have something to write
about.
Then write about it. You could also try
letting your life get good enough, and then write about that.
Either one, the trick is in the writing. My wife
went to bed about 10:30, just like usual
and I stayed up until about 2:30 wasting my time
like I have a lot to waste, watching TV, basically
channel surfing. Life pretty much sucks if you watch TV
and think that it has anything to do with your life.
Either your life is terribly banal (too true) or their version
of reality is totally screwed up. Let me see—rappers
flinging gang signs and posturing in all their poses,
young black women dancing in the aisles
of convenience stores, telephone sex lines,
Spanish-speaking thugs killing each other
race car drivers, crashes, cop chases, buildings collapsing,
women shaking their booties in your face.
Weird, I never see any of that out there in my real life.
Just leave evening church and have your wife
crying in the car that she feels like she lives alone.
Trying to figure out exactly how to make that better.
You know it's your fault, everything always is.
Somebody out there reading this, someone,
tell me what I gotta do. She won't exactly tell me
until later we're able to talk a bit about it.
I promised to be better. Can you imagine
Eliot writing about his problems with his wife?
Or even being up at 3 a.m. typing on a computer?
Probably can imagine him working late on a poem
while his wife's in bed sleeping
or in the next room ranting. Mine's sleeping,
a storm is here, the rain is coming down, I'm
working on this. This is a poem.
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