Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 33

MEDUSA REDUX

You were of two minds about everything—

country or city, teaching or retirement, lesbian

or straight sex. When you judged

that poetry contest and couldn’t choose

between two finalists (male or female)

and we used my Magic 8 Ball to pick

the winner (male), you made me promise

never to tell. Just as, years earlier, when I was

your student and you showed me a poem

you wrote about screwing my classmate (male)

you whispered secret, secret. Your skirt bunched up around your hips was one of its images. Your pull always had a push, your sweetness a sting. “Disingenuous former mentor,” is what I dubbed you

in a poem. Why, knowing that, did I

let you back in my life? Bring you to my

city, champion you to my own students,

expose them to your threadbare workshop style:

spurious nurturing, ingratiating praise.

When I called you the day my dog died,

you said, “I don’t know what you expect

me to say.” Your obdurate rebuff put

me off. Then, at Starbucks, as I reiterated

how much pain I was in, you sat mute,

stone-faced. Furious at my grief for

keeping me from you. Who would fix

your computer glitches? Or placate your

complaints about your editor, your book

designer, the director of your low-residency?

Or help unstick you from your latest

mess (an affair with a married man)?

So you ran to my colleagues, my students,

my friends—to anyone who would

listen—with your self-deflecting, under-

mining chant: What’s wrong with David? Thus, during the hardest loss of my life, your resentment twisted, hissed behind my back. At that reading, the last time I had to see you, I waited till I was ready to

leave, till the crowd thinned a path. I walked

up, looked in your eyes—those hopeless

windows—and said, “Goodbye.” I knew

from your stricken expression that you knew:

I was through with you. After I left the room,

your tears (it was later conveyed) coerced

bystanders to comfort you. At our closest,

we joked that we’d been soul mates in a past

life: husband and wife reciting poems

to each other in a cabin in the woods.

Now, in my mind’s eye, I see a woman

wrapped in a peasant shawl, hands red

with the blood of her dead children,

moaning What did I do? What did I do? She disappears into the Black Forest.

I see you (one of our last encounters), caught

for a heartbeat like an animal on a dark road,

eyes flashing from martyr-pain to self-righteous

rage, then bolting, to avoid me,

towards an exit I knew was locked.