Project for a Fainting
Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is
with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see
it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world
is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear.
To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer
to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender
and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past
midnight, sick with the thought of another year
of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe
strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer?
You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends.
Night wets me all night, blind, carried.
And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick,
love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil.
Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die.
It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.
I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent
hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass
not all transparent, and the temperature.
I felt that. What you say is not less than that.
Copyright Credit: Brenda Shaughnessy, “Project for a Fainting” from Interior with Sudden Joy. Copyright © 1999 by Brenda Shaughnessy. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
Source: Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999)