Love and Work
RACHEL WETZSTEON
In an uncurtained room across the way a woman in a tight dress paints her lips a deeper red, and sizes up her hips for signs of ounces gained since yesterday. She has a thoughtful and a clever face, but she is also smart enough to know the truth: however large the brain may grow, the lashes and the earrings must keep pace. Although I’ve spread my books in front of me with a majestic air of I’ll show her, I’m much less confident than I’d prefer, and now I’ve started pacing nervously. I’m poring over theorems, tomes and tracts. I’m getting ready for a heavy date by staying up ridiculously late. But a small voice advises, Face the facts: go on this way and you’ll soon come to harm. The world’s most famous scholars wander down the most appalling alleyways in town, a blond and busty airhead on each arm. There is an inner motor known as lust that makes a man of learning walk a mile to gratify his raging senses, while the woman he can talk to gathers dust. A chilling vision of the years ahead invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain: a barren dance card and a teeming brain, a crowded bookcase and an empty bed... What if I compromised? I’d stay up late to hone my elocutionary skills, and at the crack of dawn I’d swallow pills to calm my temper and control my weight, but I just can’t. Romantics, so far gone they think their lovers live for wisdom, woo by growing wiser; when I think of you I find the nearest lamp and turn it on. Great gods of longing, watch me as I work and if I sprout a martyr’s smarmy grin please find some violent way to do me in; I’m burning all these candles not to shirk a night of passion, but to give that night a richly textured backdrop when it comes. The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs her discourse down has never seen the flight of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage; the fool whose love is truest is the one who knows a lover’s work is never done. I’ll call you when I’ve finished one more page. |
More Love Poems
Love and Work
RACHEL WETZSTEON