"Rocking themselves down crazy slow"
I just finished reading Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, and as a study in vulnerability it might to seem to contrast Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnet I." However, vigilance and victimization are merely flip sides of the same coin, no? Anyone care to share examples of poems in which the female gaze contemplates male beauty without the looming threat? I'm curious.
II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES - IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE
You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my
notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter
he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: ’εντρπαλιζομένη is how
Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor--"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp this--hush, let's pass
to natural situations...
____________________________________
from The Beauty of the Husband (2000).
Sonnet I
Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,—I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.
______________________________________
from Renascence and Other Poems (1917).
And back to the unbearable again:
STANZAS, SEXES, SEDUCTIONS
It's good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.
The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.
Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.
I tempt you.
I blush.
There are things unbearable.
Legs alas.
Legs die.
Rocking themselves down,
crazy slow,
some ballet term for it--
fragment of foil, little
spin,
little drunk,
little do,
little oh,
alas.
___________________________________
Anne Carson, from Decreation (2005).
Oh, goddamn, that was good!
