The Amenities

I owe you an explanation.

My first memory isn’t your own

of an empty box. My babyhood cabinets held

a countlessness of cakes, my backyard

rotted into apple glut, windfalls of

money-tree, mouthfuls of fib.

At puberty I liked the locks,

I was the one who made them fast.

The yelling in our hallways was about

lost money, or lost love, but not

lost life. Or so I see it now:

in those days I romanticized

a risk (I thought I’d die

in the alcoholic automobile, die

at the hands of nerveless dentistry). Small hearts

were printed in the checkbook; when my parents called me

dear, they meant expensive.

Where were you in all that time? Out looking for

your father’s body? Making for your mother’s room?

I got my A’s in English, civics,

sweetness and light; you got black eyes, and F’s,

and nowhere fast. By 1967 when we met

(if you could call it making an acquaintance,

rape) I was a mal-adjusted gush, a sucker for

placebos. Walking home from Central Square, I came to have

the good girl’s petty dread: the woman

to whose yard you dragged me might

detect us, and be furious. More than anything else

I wanted no one mad at me. (Propriety,

or was it property, I thought

to guard: myself I gave away.)

And as for you, you had the shakes,

were barely seventeen yourself, too raw

to get it up (I said don’t be afraid,

afraid of what might happen if you failed).

And afterwards, in one of those moments

it’s hard to tell (funny from fatal) you did

a terrible civility: you told me

thanks. I’ll never forget

that moment all my life.

It wasn’t until then, as you

were sheathing it to run,

I saw the knife.

Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)