Spot in the Dark Beth Gylys T H E O H I O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S • Columbus Copyright © 2004 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gylys, Beth. Spot in the dark / Beth Gylys. p. cm. ISBN 0-8142-0981-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-9057-4 (cd-rom) I. Man-woman relationships—Poetry. 2. Interpersonal relations—Poetry. 3. Solitude—Poetry. I. Title. PS3607.Y58S68 2004 811'.6—dc22 2004020840 Cover by Dan O’Dair. Type set in Adobe Bembo Printed by Thomson-Shore The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirement of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is dedicated in memory of my beloved, deceased grandmothers: Angeline Sutton and Anna Kowalski. Contents Acknowledgments ix I Spot in the Dark Fallen in Love Again, The Distance of Motion Wheels Inside Wheels If Only Winter Preparations Moving Topsoil and Thinking about Us The Edge of Enough En Route Nowhere Fast 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 II Me and You and an Oh Hands Full of Nothing Letter, March 18 No News Here Returns Common Dreams The Mistress To One Who Can’t Leave The Wish 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 III Alone, Open Road Friend of a Friend of a Soul Mate With a Woman Teaching Composition in Erie, Pennsylvania, or Madonna Should Never Write a Dating Column Winter, Erie, PA I Believe in Pain the Way Others Believe in God Lyric Melancholia in Winter 29 31 34 35 36 38 39 40 The Letter I Sent to My Mother Explanations for Distraction Her Power The Art of Schmoozing My Former Lover Said He Was Tired What’s Left What We Keep When Lovers Go The Feeling of Wings After the Goodbye 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 IV Ars Poetica Boardwalk and Bach Again Matin Worms Dancing My Doggy Self Audience of Two When Can I See Your Shetland Ponies, Pilgrimage viii 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 Acknowledgments Many helped to bring this book into being. Jeff Worley, Diana Hume George, Jon Schofer and Michael Walls gave invaluable comments on early drafts of this manuscript. Ellen Bryant Voigt helped me to find the pulse of poems in section II. Thanks to members of my writers groups at George’s and in upstate New York who commented on early drafts of some of these poems—thanks especially to Cathy Carlisi for her keen insights and good spirit and to Nancy Whitelaw for being such a generous host.Thanks to Michael Opperman, Dan Welcher, Jim Cummins, and Nkanyiso Mpofu for inspiration and support, and to Rodger Moody for his grace and unflagging support and for encouraging me to wait.Thanks also to Andrew Hudgins for guidance and for choosing the manuscript as a finalist and to David Citino for making the final selection. I also thank Georgia State University for financial and professional support and the MacDowell Colony for wonderful food and time to muse. I am deeply grateful to the editors of the journals where these poems first appeared. • 32 Poems: “Wheels Inside Wheels” • Blue Moon Review: “Pilgrimage” • Caffeine Destiny: “To One Who Can’t Leave” • Canary River: “Another Departure” and “With a Woman” • Cimarron: “My Doggy Self ” • Connecticut Poetry Review: “Explanations for Distraction” and “The Art of Schmoozing” • Good Foot: “Lyric Melancholia” and “Spot in the Dark” • Kenyon Review: “No News Here” • Pierian Springs Review: “Alone, Open Road” • Poetry Kanto: “The Letter I Sent to My Mother,” “My Former Lover Said He Was Tired,” and “Me and You and an Oh” • Poet Lore: “If Only” and “Nowhere Fast” • Puerto del Sol: “Winter, Erie, PA” • Terminus: “Boardwalk and Bach” and “The Distance of Motion” • Southern Review: “Winter Preparations” • Wind: “Falling in Love Again” and “Hands Full of Nothing” • Word: “Friend of a Friend of a” ix Also thanks to the editor of the anthology On the Shores of Lake Erie, where the following poems are forthcoming, for permission to print them here: “Teaching Composition in Erie, Pennsylvania” and “Again.” x Spot in the Dark In love, he bought himself a laser gun, and used its spot of light to tease his dog. She lived three hours away, but they talked each night. Why did he always find these women, dark, a hot flash in a pan of trouble? “Sick,” he murmured, “I must be really sick.” His love twisted in his gut. “You’re not in love,” his ex snorted when he told her. They’d gone to lunch the week before. “It’s just a sick infatuation.” Nights, he’d take his dog and walk the graveyard. The breeze, the bluish dark would calm his aching heart. Why did the night appease him so? He thought about the night six months before, how fast he’d fallen in love. He met her in a dive, a smoky, dark hole of a place, where locals liked to gun their engines. He’d ordered fries, a foot-long dog. She’d been there with some friends. “It wasn’t sick,” he said out loud, remembered her eyes, “not sick at all,” the way he’d wanted her that night. They drank and talked until he heard his dog outside. “I better go. I’d really love to know you more.” They hadn’t even begun, he realized. She scrawled her number in the dark. Now he lived for moments in the dark with her beside him: skin, wine, music, lips. She had to live in Michigan. She had to be the type that wants a knight in shining armor, that looks to every love to save her from herself. She tried to dog \3 him into moving. “My job, the house, the dog— how can I move?” he pleaded in the dark, the cordless phone, lifeline to his love. It didn’t matter what he said. How sick he’d feel when they hung up. Even the night seemed unforgiving, his heart a loaded gun. He heard his dog whining in the dark, turned on the laser gun and fenced the night. He wondered if love would always make him sick. 4 Letter, March 18 By now you have arrived home, leafed through your mail, heard the messages on your machine. You have emptied your bag, thrown your worn laundry down the chute.You have changed. Dark, pressed, you have backed from your drive, the front porchlight glancing yellow against the walkway. By now you have arrived at the opera and you sit on red, padded chairs, beside her. By now the hotel bed sheets have been replaced, the bed remade, and someone else might lie there. He touches her face, or she his, or maybe they’re watching CNN, or he is thinking about the arc of hills they just drove through, or she is thinking about the sound the rain makes against a rooftop. By now I have pulled the blinds, and the birds aren’t singing, and the train outside shrills: “Ohhh—oh.” And though it is still winter, the crocuses in my yard are blooming purple. And though it is still winter, I can almost taste the heat. 19 Alone, Open Road It was raining, a slow, persistent December rain, the drops more like cold oil than water as they spattered my face, and the man by the roadside, held up one Christmas tree after another. All of them huge, I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. What about that one?” “You’ll have to get your husband to trim it down for you.” Usually I just smile, nod, but this time, I admitted, “There’s no husband.” Maybe I wanted to prove something. He was short, dark-haired, greasy-looking, with dirt-stained overalls and an orange coat he wore unzipped. His eyes kind of bulged, like creatures I’ve dissected in past science experiments. I wondered if those were blood-stains on his chest. “You’re single? What do you do?” “I teach.” “You want to go out sometime?” He paused. “I bet you never dated a tree farmer.” An eighteen-wheeler careened past, roar of wheels and water and engine. I stared at my boots, wondered how to get out of this one. “I’m Stan. What’s your name?” “Iris,” I lied, avoided his eyes. He shrugged, hoisted the tree into my neighbor’s pickup. Back on the highway, I sang to the radio, 29 windshield wipers flapping, tree flouncing in the truckbed. Sometimes it’s not so bad, traveling alone, open road, pedal to the floor. No one to betray—no one to forgive. 30 Teaching Composition in Erie, Pennsylvania, or Madonna Should Never Write a Dating Column I’m trying to write a funny poem about Madonna, about an interview the star granted recently with a Hungarian who kept asking her about her sex life. The interviewer, for instance, asks Madonna, “When you met Carlos, were you dating many other people in your bed at the same time? And what was your book ‘Slut’ about?” (The actual book title, you may remember, is Sex. and I wonder: does sex equal slut in Hungaria?) The Hungarians, says her interviewer, like to hear her musical productions and “move their bodies in response.” He asks if she’s “a bold hussy-woman that feasts on men who are tops.” “Yes, yes,” she affirms, but she is “a woman, not a test mouse.” It’s winter in Erie, capitol of antidepressants. My poem comes out like a mix between a cookbook recipe and a textbook assignment. I try it rhyming. But what rhymes with Madonna? Lasagna? You wanna? How about Hungarian? Librarian? I’m wearing him? I scrawl: “I’m a woman, not a test mouse. Put your fingers on my dress blouse.” It’s not funny that it’s been gray in town for weeks, that I spend my time reading poorly constructed sentences when I chose to study literature for the love of good writing. And besides, my body, dying to be touched, hates Madonna, whose men trail after her like dogs following a steak, who is not being ironic when she says, “In America it is not considered mentally ill when a woman advances on her prey in a discotheque setting with cocktails.” I’d sooner kiss a toilet than go to a discotheque, but even my grandmother’s giving me dating advice: “What about joining a gym? I hear you can meet nice young men that way.” I sit at home imagining the five single men in Erie 36 with long nasal hairs and halitosis, or pale and doughy selling fake wood furniture at Value City, which is unfair and ridiculous, but my therapist tells me, it’s okay, I’m exploring new dimensions of myself. Well, new dimensions have done nothing for my social life. And writing this poem about Madonna, who’s obviously having way more sex than I am, is just depressing. 37 Worms Dancing Just last week it snowed. The shroud of winter for months has hung above our roofs like oil, but now blossoms dot the yard with color. Lemon, orange, and red, they spring from the soil like children in brightly colored shirts bursting from under blankets. One neighbor’s already out and poking in her yard, coiffed hair, blue knickers hiking toward her knees. Here come some boys on bikes across the lawn, they shout and land on only one wheel, skid toward home. They’re crazy with the knot of sex that’s thrusting from every bough and petal, so thick and new that even the worms emerge from dirt and shit to writhe and double from the thrill of it. 57 Pilgrimage We make our way to this park, the end of Lincoln Ave, this patch of well-coifed grass: me, the couple in khakis, their hands buried in each other’s back pockets, the man on a bicycle, some teens shivering in T-shirts, their brown lab snuffling at the end of his leash. Below us the bay: shifting, impatient; the boathouse with its sailboats leaning elegantly to one side. Meanwhile, the sun’s peach eye sinks quickly toward the bay’s-edge. A man holding a blue coffee cup stands to my left. A woman huffs to the curb pushing a baby carriage. We are silent, shifting foot to foot. White smudged lines of an airplane crisscross above the sun, whose bottom has melted now into the water’s lap. A green Porsche slowly cruises past. A bird hovers above us then dives, and the sun’s a pale half dollar in a yowl of plum and scarlet. How the sky seems to reel with it then: that heft of fire descending, now copper, now chartreuse, now a darkened smear of gold, and we’re dumb, straining, lingering to the end, when we will turn back into strangers, but now, transfixed, we are one eye burning with glory. 61