Open Shutters Read Free Page B

receding gums
    have humbled me; I know my station
    as a member of their generation.
    Maybe they’d let me play the drums,
        the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Office Hours
    Unlock the door, drop my backpack,
    turn the computer on, and the kettle;
    waiting for both to warm up, settle
    behind the unfilable disaster
    of my cabinet, and ignore that stack
        on the floor since last semester.
    What a strange job I have—supplying
    people with meter and metaphors!
    I could be trying to write poems.
    Instead, I’ve tried improving yours—
    the ones about your grandmothers dying,
        your cats, your broken homes,
    your clueless junior years in Europe;
    vainly I’ve tried to quash the onset
    of another sonnet on a sunset.
    Commencement Day should make me cheer up;
    and although today I feel elated
        a pack of you graduated
    (the few who slaved to get a summa,
    the hundreds who will die not knowing
    the proper placement of the comma),
    I must admit that, watching caps
    and gowns go by, I had a lapse
        in judgment: I was growing
    sorry to lose—well, two of you.
    Funny, clever, and modest too,
    fresh from an internship at
Glamour,
    lovely Amanda would always bring—
    throughout the autumn, winter, spring—
        poems about sex last summer.
    Diane was writing a Book of Hours.
    Terse through her Terce, mutely applauding
    her Lauds, I knew my place, at least.
    Deferring to her higher powers,
    behind the grille of my desk, nodding,
        I listened like a priest.
    Sure, it was selfish that I booked
    you both for Tuesdays at eleven,
    but didn’t you find to your surprise
    (as I did) that fine-tuning even
    projects unlike as yours soon looked
        part of one enterprise,
    and to hell with “independent studies”?
    To view the whole thing as a game
    we’d dare to lose at; to focus on
    one line until it’s more than one—
    yes, you
got
that, and I came
        to see you as my buddies,
    who reminded me of that grand plan
    I had, I think, when I was young.
    You showed we could write anything
    at all, if we took the time to do it.
    Excuse me, Amanda and Diane,
        if I now start to get to it.

The Big Sleep
    Two bodies in bed, each with a book.
    “Would you mind if I turn
    the light off?” I ask nicely.
    “Would you mind waiting
    just a few more pages?” he asks nicely;
    “They just found another dead body.”
    (My husband is reading Raymond Chandler.)
    “Sure,” I say. “I understand.”
    So I go back to my book.
    Mine is about the disastrous history
    of navigation, before the solution
    of the problem of longitude.
    More often,
he’s
reading about science,
    and I’m reading fiction.
    After a while I set down the book,
    and behind my lids I see floaters of planets
    slide and flicker—
    celestial bodies, all unlabeled,
    that could never guide me if I were a sailor.
    My husband’s the one
    with the sense of direction.
    (Yes, I’m aware
    of the gender cliché—
    but what can I do? It’s true.)
    Amazing what he doesn’t notice—
    what I’m wearing, what he’s wearing,
    half the things I notice.
    But he can’t believe I’d never dare
    to experiment with a new route home;
    that before reading this book, this week,
    I’d always confused latitude and longitude.
    For now, though, nobody’s going far.
    “Want me to read this aloud to you?”
    he offers. “It might help you sleep.”
    He reads me a few pages
    of snappy dialogue and guns
    before I stop him.
    “It’s too funny,” I say.
    “It’s too wonderful. It makes me laugh.
    I’ll never get to sleep.”
    He turns off the light—
    which may mean what it does
    in Raymond Chandler movies.
    But soon we slide, lock, side to side,
    my stomach to his back,
    like continents buckling
    over the rumpled waters,
    and in time, although no observer
    is there to report it, we probably look
    like corpses, except that he always snores.
    Sometimes I do. We wake each other up
    a lot, and apologize,
    his body and my body,
    till death