Been in a writing mood lately, and some of it I’m actually proud enough to want to share with the general public. Odd how anxiety attacks seem to spark poetry like nothing else in the world. Had one a couple of weeks back when I was out of town and my car needed emergency repairs and the bank was overdrawn and stress levels were just generally intolerable, so I went digging through the web to find the old poem I used to do for Verse reading back in High School.
Amazing how time can change the way you look at something. I mean, I got it as a teenager… kind of necessary when you’re performing it every week, analyzing the levels to make sure that every last shred of gut-wrenching emotion hangs in your voice… but I didn’t really understand the whole rage and shame against your own self-pity and bad decisions aspect. So we’ll start with someone else’s work to kick things off, because it’s a damned good piece on what it means to love unconditionally in an abusive situation, and how difficult it is to trust your instincts when you’ve finally said goodbye to that chapter in your life.
The Pink Dress
by Diane Wakoski
(c. 1970, from her anthology Emerald Ice)
I could not wear that pink dress tonight.
The velvet one
lace tinting the cuffs with all
the coffee
of longing. My bare shoulder
slipping whiter
than foam
out of the night to remind me
of my own
vulnerability.
I could not wear that pink dress tonight
because it is a dress
that slips memories like
the hands
of obscene strangers
all over my body.
And in my fatigue I could not fight away the images
and their mean touching.
I couldn’t wear that pink dress,
the velvet one you had made for me,
all year, you know.
I thought I would tonight because
once again
you have let me enter your house
and look at myself
some mornings
in your mirrors.
But
I could not wear that pink dress tonight
because it reminded me
of everything
that hurts.
It reminded me of a whole year
during which
I wandered,
a gypsy,
and could not come into your house.
It reminded me of the picture of a blond girl
you took with you to Vermont
and shared your woods with.
The pretty face you left over your bed to stare
at me
and remind me
each night
that you preferred her face to mine,
and which you left there to stare at me
even when you saw how it
broke me,
my calm,
like a stick smashing across my own
plain, lonesome face,
and a face which you only
took down
from your wall
after I had mutilated it
and pushed pins in it to get those smug
smiling eyes off my cold
winter
body.
I couldn’t wear that pink dress tonight
because it reminded me
of the girl who made it,
whom you slept with
last year while I was sitting in hotel rooms
wondering why I had to live
with a face
so stony no man could love it.
I could not wear that pink dress
because it reminded me
of how I camp on your doorstep now,
still a gypsy,
still a colorful imaginative beggar
in my pink dress,
building a fire in the landowner’s
woods, and my own fierceness
that deserts me
when a man
no, when you,
show a little care and concern for my presence.
I could not wear that pink dress tonight.
It betrayed all that was strong in me.
The leather boots I wear to stomp through the world
and remind everyone
of the silver and gold and diamonds
from fairy tales
glittering in their lives.
And of the heavy responsibility
we all must bear
just being so joyfully alive
just letting the blood take its own course
in intact vessels
in veins.
That pink dress betrayed my one favorite image
-the motorcyclist riding along the highway
independent
alone
exhilarated with movement
a blackbird
more beautiful than any white ones.
But I went off
not wearing the pink dress,
thinking how much I love you
and how if a woman loves a man who does not love her back
it is, as some good poet said,
a pain in the ass.
For both of them.
I went off thinking about all the girls
you preferred to me.
Leaving behind that dress,
remembering one of the colors
of pain
Remembering that my needs
affront you,
my face is not beautiful to you;
you would not share your woods with me.
And the irony
of my images.
That you are the motorcycle rider.
Not I.
I am perhaps,
at best
the pink dress
thrown against the back
of the chair.
The dress I could not wear
tonight.
