Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

She’s a cold beauty with a knowing wink.

If she shot you dead, she’d finish your drink.

Some guys learn from their mistakes,

But all he learned is to raise the stakes.

There’s something he forgot in jail—

That the female’s deadlier than the male.

It’s tough love from a hard, blue flame ,

And you can’t beat a pro at her own game.

It’s the long con. It’s the old switcheroo.

You think you’re a player, but the mark is you.

She’s married but lonely. She wishes she could.

Watch your hands! Oh, that feels good.

She whispers how much she needs a man.

If only he’d help her. She has a plan.

Their eyes meet, and he can tell

It’s gonna be fun, but it won’t end well.

He hears her plot with growing unease.

She strokes his cheek, and he agrees.

It’s a straight shot. It’s an easy kill.

If he doesn’t help her, some other guy will.

It’s a sleek piece with only one slug.

Spin the chambers and give it a tug.

The heat of her lips, the silk of her skin.

His body ignites. He pushes in.

They lie in the dark under the fan—

A sex-drunk chump, a girl with a plan.

The flowers sent here by mistake,

signed with a name that no one knew,

are turning bad. What shall we do?

Our neighbor says they’re not for her,

and no one has a birthday near.

We should thank someone for the blunder.

Is one of us having an affair?

At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,

enshrouded in its sickly sweet

and lingering perfume. The roses

fell one petal at a time,

and now the ferns are turning dry.

The room smells like a funeral,

but there they sit, too much at home,

accusing us of some small crime,

like love forgotten, and we can’t

throw out a gift we’ve never owned.

Looking for something in the Sunday paper,

I flipped by accident to Local Weddings ,

Yet missed the photograph until I saw

Your name among the headings.

And there you were, looking almost unchanged,

Your hair still long, though now long out of style,

And you still wore that stiff, ironic look

That was your smile.

I felt as though we sat there face to face.

My stomach tightened. I read the item through.

It said too much about both families,

Too little about you.

Finished at last, I put the paper down,

Stung by jealousy, my mind aflame—

Hating this man, this stranger whom you loved,

This printed name.

And yet I clipped it out to put away

Inside a book like something I might use,

A scrap I knew I wouldn’t read again

But couldn’t bear to lose.

Every night I wake and find myself

Alone in this strange bedroom. Always puzzled,

I walk into the hallway, blinking at the lights

And somehow know I’m on the highest floor

Of an enormous mansion full of people.

Then leaning on the banister I hear

The noise of a party down below,

And sad, slow music drifting up the stairwell

Like one last waltz that an exhausted band

Will play to satisfy an audience

That won’t go home. Curious, I descend

The elegantly curving staircase, finding

Each floor darker and more crowded, people

Everywhere: on the landing, in the corridors,

Some staring, others arguing, most so drunk

They don’t even notice that I’m there.

Then someone calls, “Mary, come down, come down,

And dance with us!” I try to answer him,

But it’s so dark and crowded I can’t see

The bottom yet, and I keep walking down

Until the music, laughter, cheap perfume,

The shouting people, all the smoke from cigarettes

Make me so dizzy I could faint, and still

He calls me, “Mary, come down, come down,”

And as I reach for him, the voices pause,

The music stops, and there is nothing there

But one voice laughing in another room.

Speaking of love was difficult at first.

We groped for those lost, untarnished words

That parents never traded casually at home,

The radio had not devalued.

How little there seemed left to us.

So, speaking of love, we chose

The harsh and level language of denial

Knowing only what we did not wish to say,

Choosing silence in our terror of a lie.

For surely love existed before words.

But silence can become its own cliché,

And bodies lie as skillfully as words,

So one by one we spoke the easy lines

The other had resisted but desired,

Trusting that love renewed their innocence.

Was it then that words became unstuck?

That star no longer seemed enough for star?

Our borrowed speech demanded love so pure

And so beyond our power that we saw

How words were only forms of our regret.

And so at last we speak again of love,

Now that there is nothing left unsaid,

Surrendering our voices to the past,

Which has betrayed us. Each of us alone,

With no words left to summon back our love.

Turning the corner, we discovered it

just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—

a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long

resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves

across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window

glowing through the ivy-decked facade

promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all

the high black doors of houses bolted shut.

And yet we could have opened any door,

entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we so deluded by the strange

equations of the light, the vagrant wind

searching the trees, that we believed this brief

conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,

a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,

a curl of smoke flaring from a match,

haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,

the smile of a stranger, something beyond

the soft refusals of the summer air

and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.

Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,

and at the end what else could we have done

but turn the corner back into our life?

… and watching her undress across the room,

oblivious of him, watching as her slip

falls soundlessly and disappears in shadow,

and the dim lamplight makes her curving frame

seem momentarily both luminous

and insubstantial — like the shadow of a cloud

drifting across a hillside far away.

Watching her turn away, this slender ghost,

this silhouette of mystery, his wife,

walk naked to her bath, the room around her

so long familiar that it is, like him,

invisible to her, he sees himself

suspended in the branches by the window,

entering this strange bedroom with his eyes.

Seen from the darkness, even the walls glow—

a golden woman lights the amber air.

He looks and aches not only for her touch

but for the secret that her presence brings.