Shame
A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me—
I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things—
she’d decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant,
which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected,
but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.
Copyright Credit: C. K. Williams, “Shame” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by C. K. Williams. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
Source: Selected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994)