She Walks in Beauty Page 15

  Although female friendships are an important part of our lives, there are not as many poems about female friendship as one might expect. Poets seem to be more concerned with love relationships or their solitary pursuits. However, when they do examine the subject of friendship, they distill its essence. One of the most important qualities in a friendship is that it makes each of us into a better person. “A Poem of Friendship” by Nikki Giovanni and “Love” by Roy Croft explore this aspect of friendship. Other poems, like “My Friend’s Divorce” by Naomi Shihab Nye and “Secret Lives” by Barbara Ras, celebrate the love and support friends give each other during difficult times.

  One of my daughters’ favorite poems is the dark and startling “A Poison Tree” by William Blake. Blake was ahead of his time in recognizing how important it is to discuss anger and disappointment with our friends, and the dangerous consequences of withholding our feelings.

  Once our children have left home (although they say that never really happens), we look for others to care for. I know quite a few middle-aged women who have fallen in love with their pets—and I am one of them. That is why Elizabeth Barrett Browning, known better for her sonnet “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” is represented here with a poem to her dog, Flush.

  And when we run out of friends, there is always “Chocolate” by Rita Dove.

  A Poem of Friendship

  NIKKI GIOVANNI

  We are not lovers

  because of the love

  we make

  but the love

  we have

  We are not friends

  because of the laughs

  we spend

  but the tears

  we save

  I don’t want to be near you

  for the thoughts we share

  but the words we never have

  to speak

  I will never miss you

  because of what we do

  but what we are

  together

  Letter to N.Y.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP

  For Louise Crane

  In your next letter I wish you’d say

  where you are going and what you are doing;

  how are the plays, and after the plays

  what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

  taking cabs in the middle of the night,

  driving as if to save your soul

  where the road goes round and round the park

  and the meter glares like a moral owl,

  and the trees look so queer and green

  standing alone in big black caves

  and suddenly you’re in a different place

  where everything seems to happen in waves,

  and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,

  like dirty words rubbed off a slate,

  and the songs are loud but somehow dim

  and it gets so terribly late,

  and coming out of the brownstone house

  to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,

  one side of the buildings rises with the sun

  like a glistening field of wheat.

  —Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid

  if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,

  nevertheless I’d like to know

  what you are doing and where you are going.

  On Gifts for Grace

  BERNADETTE MAYER

  I saw a great teapot

  I wanted to get you this stupendous

  100% cotton royal blue and black checked shirt,

  There was a red and black striped one too

  Then I saw these boots at a place called Chuckles

  They laced up to about two inches above your ankles

  All leather and in red, black or purple

  It was hard to have no money today

  I won’t even speak about the possible flowers and kinds of lingerie

  All linen and silk with not-yet-perfumed laces

  Brilliant enough for any of the Graces

  Full of luxury, grace notes, prosperousness and charm

  But I can only praise you with this poem—

  Its being is the same as the meaning of your name

  Love

  ROY CROFT

  I love you,

  Not only for what you are,

  But for what I am

  When I am with you.

  I love you,

  Not only for what

  You have made of yourself,

  But for what

  You are making of me.

  I love you

  For the part of me

  That you bring out;

  I love you

  For putting your hand

  Into my heaped-up heart

  And passing over

  All the foolish, weak things

  That you can’t help

  Dimly seeing there,

  And for drawing out

  Into the light

  All the beautiful belongings

  That no one else had looked

  Quite far enough to find.

  I love you because you

  Are helping me to make

  Of the lumber of my life

  Not a tavern

  But a temple;

  Out of the works

  Of my every day

  Not a reproach

  But a song.

  I love you

  Because you have done

  More than any creed

  Could have done

  To make me good,

  And more than any fate

  Could have done

  To make me happy.

  You have done it

  Without a touch,

  Without a word,

  Without a sign.

  You have done it

  By being yourself.

  Perhaps that is what

  Being a friend means,

  After all.

  To Hayley

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:

  Do be my enemy—for friendship’s sake.

  A Poison Tree

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  I was angry with my friend:

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:

  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  And I water’d it in fears,

  Night and morning with my tears;

  And I sunned it with smiles,

  And with soft deceitful wiles.

  And it grew both day and night,

  Till it bore an apple bright;

  And my foe beheld it shine,

  And he knew that it was mine,

  And into my garden stole

  When the night had veil’d the pole:

  In the morning glad I see

  My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.

  August

  LOUISE GLÜCK

  My sister painted her nails fuchsia,

  a color named after a fruit.

  All the colors were named after foods:

  coffee frost, tangerine sherbet.

  We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume

  the ascent summer interrupted:

  triumphs, victories, for which school

  was a kind of practice.

  The teachers smiled down at us, pinning on the blue ribbons.

  And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.

  Our lives were stored in our heads.

  They hadn’t begun; we were both sure

  we’d know when they did.

  They certainly weren’t this.

  We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:

  first bright pink, then tan.

  I dribbled baby oil on my legs; my sister

  rubbed polish remover on her left hand,

  tried another color.

  We read, we listened to the portable radio.

  Obviously this wasn’t life, this sitting around

  in colored law
n chairs.

  Nothing matched up to the dreams.

  My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:

  it was summer, they were all frosted.

  Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.

  She held her left hand in front of her eyes,

  moved it from side to side.

  Why was it always like this—

  the colors so intense in the glass bottles,

  so distinct, and on the hand

  almost exactly alike,

  a film of weak silver.

  My sister shook the bottle. The orange

  kept sinking to the bottom; maybe

  that was the problem.

  She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,

  studied the words in the magazine.

  The world was a detail, a small thing not yet

  exactly right. Or like an afterthought, somehow

  still crude or approximate.

  What was real was the idea:

  My sister added a coat, held her thumb

  to the side of the bottle.

  We kept thinking we would see

  the gap narrow, though in fact it persisted.

  The more stubbornly it persisted,

  the more fiercely we believed.

  Summer at the Beach

  LOUISE GLÜCK

  Before we started camp, we went to the beach.

  Long days, before the sun was dangerous.

  My sister lay on her stomach, reading mysteries.

  I sat in the sand, watching the water.

  You could use the sand to cover

  parts of your body that you didn’t like.

  I covered my feet, to make my legs longer;

  the sand climbed over my ankles.

  I looked down at my body, away from the water.

  I was what the magazines told me to be:

  coltish. I was a frozen colt.

  My sister didn’t bother with these adjustments.

  When I told her to cover her feet, she tried a few times,

  but she got bored; she didn’t have enough willpower

  to sustain a deception.

  I watched the sea; I listened to the other families.

  Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?

  I couldn’t imagine myself as a baby;

  I couldn’t picture myself not thinking.

  I couldn’t imagine myself as an adult either.

  They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely

  committed to being male and female.

  The days were all the same.

  When it rained, we stayed home.

  When the sun shone, we went to the beach with my mother.

  My sister lay on her stomach, reading her mysteries.

  I sat with my legs arranged to resemble

  what I saw in my head, what I believed was my true self.

  Because it was true: when I didn’t move I was perfect.

  Girlfriends

  ELLEN DORÉ WATSON

  First and last, mirrors

  whose secrets we keep in a home-made petrie dish

  (sometimes they give us ideas)

  I mean the ones who say the unwelcome when it matters

  whose kids watch us for clues

  whose kids we watch for clues

  Not the ones who decided there was too much too true

  of them in our eyes, and ran,

  but the ones who’ll be around to see us bald or one-breasted

  and we them

  who’ll know to say what can’t be said (with their skin)

  whose bodies, spreading or starved, we love

  whose husbands (or lack of) it’s okay to disapprove, or almost covet

  whose girlfriends are ours by proxy

  who share these assumptions and would their last

  Godiva, valium, amulet

  The lifers

  who, even seven states away, are the porches

  where we land

  My Friend’s Divorce

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  I want her

  To dig up

  every plant

  in her garden,

  the pansies, the penta,

  roses, rununculas,

  thyme and the lilies,

  the thing

  nobody knows the name of,

  unwind the morning glories

  from the wire windows

  of the fence,

  take the blooming

  and the almost-blooming

  and the dormant,

  especially the dormant,

  and then

  and then

  plant them in her new yard

  on the other side

  of town

  and see how

  they breathe!

  Chocolate

  RITA DOVE

  Velvet fruit, exquisite square

  I hold up to sniff

  between finger and thumb—

  how you numb me

  With your rich attentions!

  If I don’t eat you quickly,

  you’ll melt in my palm.

  Pleasure seeker, if I let you

  you’d liquefy everywhere.

  Knotted smoke, dark punch

  of earth and night and leaf,

  for a taste of you

  any woman would gladly

  crumble to ruin.

  Enough chatter: I am ready

  to fall in love!

  Magnificat

  MICHÈLE ROBERTS

  For Sian, after thirteen years

  oh this man

  what a meal he made of me

  how he chewed and gobbled and sucked

  in the end he spat me all out

  you arrived on the dot, in the nick

  of time, with your red curls flying

  I was about to slip down the sink like grease

  I nearly collapsed, I almost

  wiped myself out like a stain

  I called for you, and you came, you voyaged

  fierce as a small archangel with swords and breasts

  you declared the birth of a new life

  in my kitchen there was an annunciation

  and I was still, awed by your hair’s glory

  you commanded me to sing of my redemption

  oh my friend, how

  you were mother for me, and how

  I could let myself lean on you

  comfortable as an old cloth, familiar as enamel saucepans

  I was a child again, pyjamaed

  in winceyette, my hair plaited, and you

  listened, you soothed me like cakes and milk

  you listened to me for three days, and I poured

  it out, I flowed all over you

  like wine, like oil, you touched the place where it hurt

  at night we slept together in my big bed

  your shoulder eased me towards dreams

  when we met, I tell you

  it was a birthday party, a funeral

  it was a holy communion

  between women, a Visitation

  it was two old she-goats butting

  and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold

  Secret Lives

  BARBARA RAS

  The same moms that smear peanut butter on bread, sometimes tearing

  the white center and patching it with a little spit,

  the same moms who hold hair back from faces throwing up into bowls

  and later sit with their kids at bedtime, never long enough at first,

  and then inevitably overtime, grabbing on to a hand

  as if they could win out against the pull on the other side,

  the world’s spin and winds and tides,

  all of it in cahoots with sex to pull the kid into another orbit,

  these moms will go out, maybe in pairs, sometimes in groups,

  and leave their kids with dads and fast food, something greasy

  they eat with their fingers, later miniature golf, may
be a movie,

  a walk with the dog in the dog park,

  where one night a kid sees an old mutt riding in a stroller,

  invalid, on its back, its paws up, cute like that, half begging, half swoon,

  and this kid, who once told her mom she knew what dads did on poker nights—

  “They’re guys, they’ll just deal the cards and quarrel”—

  starts to wonder what moms do out together, whether they talk about their kids,

  their little rosebuds, their little night-lights,

  or are they talking about their bodies and what they did with them

  in Portugal, Hawaii, the coast of France, it’s better than cards,

  it’s anatomy and geography, they’re all over the map,

  or maybe not talking but dancing—

  to oldies? light rock? merengue? Would they dare dance

  with men, with men in vests? in earmuffs? forget earmuffs!

  top hats, younger men in sneakers who catch their eye from across the room.

  Now they’re singing. Where have they kept the words to so many songs,

  storing them up like secrets, hidden candy, the words melting in their mouths,

  chocolate, caramels, taffy,

  the next thing you know they’ll be drinking—or are they already

  on to a third bottle, some unaffordable Nebbiolo

  from the Piedmont, red wine named after the region’s fog

  and aging into a hint of truffles.

  Soon two of them will walk off together, laughing,

  their mouths open too wide, their shoulders, no their whole bodies

  shaking, the way a bear would laugh after it ate you,

  heartily, remorselessly, they laugh all the way to the bathroom,

  where together in the mirrors they try to keep a straight face

  so they can put on lipstick the crimson of the sun sinking into the bay.

  They blot their red mouths on tissues they toss

  over their shoulders, leaving the impressions of their lips behind