Vanessa Gabb
from THE LADY OF CIVILIZATION
you brought to me
the word marriage
and I asked what that meant
if its history meant
I was unfree
how found could we be
I wanted you to know
I want to be
a woman
I wanted you to know
I have always been
preoccupied by this
though you were
not and so were we
doomed to know
each other well
enough to say goodbye?
or maybe
we came to know
nothing about each other
not even how
to say yes
just as I will
sense my own fear
with strange men
the way the world works
its terror so
that I will
know you
suddenly in them
the contradictions live
in us
in cellular form
I am not entirely
without
a place to live
yesterday I fed
our cats then lay
back in your bed
I imagined
falling asleep
if you had
found me
waiting to be discovered
because I want to be
discovered
look
I have told you far more
now than ever then
about passion
passion:
the first form of rapture
remembered
by the poets
of the Middle Ages
writing about knights
lying beside wives
of other men
it is a long way to this
I have
I am here
a winter
of me and me