ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
Butterflies rise in courtship, but
people fall in love. I’m thinking
what fun a talk-show host would make of
my romantic accidents and failures,
the heeding of blessed appetite
when it teases, This is how to survive, girl!
even when you know it’s a wrong thing to desire.
I’m thinking
about my friend, our lunches
sprinkled over the past two years
in which, after we covered the business
of our books and agents, we turned
to the tiresome topic
of our loneliness, how we know
what we won’t give up
for love—not wanting to fall
from what we’ve built alone and wondering
if this makes us incapable of
having what we want.
I’m thinking
of another friend, long married,
after hearing of the in-house
separation—that trial,
that desperation—when one partner begins
to rupture out of his former self
not knowing what he’s becoming
only that without breaking
what he was
he will be broken.
I’m thinking
of a woman who embraces her marriage
by juggling lovers on the side—
“impure,” she calls herself,
try “European,” I advise. This
strategy came to her only after
her husband’s affair, and she promised
her wounded self to draw a border
he would never cross.