Pencil Sketch of Self & Other
Print
When you kissed me it was as if
some one had just stepped lightly out of the room.
How shy I was in any crowd,
and you, how adept!
How I kept you waiting
longer than any boy uncertain of his sex!
Your mother, musical, suicidal,
slept with a thread tied around her nurse’s finger
(so I learned a few details), your rich father
photographed beside his swimming pool….
How we almost ruined each other, you
with your hope of children,
I with my body which I took too seriously;
That stunned room….
A story, like The Garden party,
no longer even possible.
Yet I want to forgive us both
as if it still matters.
Contributor
Jane CooperCooper was the author of five books of poetry and a professor of Sarah Lawrence College.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
There is Always Room for Cream
by Jessica Del VecchioOCT 2017 | Theater
It’s hard to believe it has been almost ten years since the Dyke Division of the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf first introduced audiences to Room for Cream, their “live lesbian soap opera” that ran for three “seasons” at La Mama and became an underground hit.
Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room
by Sophie KovelMAY 2019 | ArtSeen
This current exhibition is full of paintings that can be entered, walked around, under. Mack, who staunchly identifies as a painter, has produced an installation for the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall that is void of the medium’s historical materials: oils, acrylics, canvas, and supports.
Inside the Disenchanted World of Left Keynesianism: A Review of Yanis Varoufakis's Adults in the Room
by Pavlos RoufosSEPT 2017 | Field Notes
The publication of Yanis Varoufakis’s new book Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (London: The Bodley Head, 2017) caused a considerable uproar in the Greek political discourse, as well as some international coverage.
The Oldest Woman in the Room: A Feminist Life Lesson from my Mother
by Laurie Gwen ShapiroMAR 2019 | Critics Page
Back in the Stone Age of the early 1980s when people still relied on landlines, I was a latchkey kid who often answered the phone for my parents before they got home from work.
RSS