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The Final Scene
The business of love / is cruelty which / by our wills /
We transform / to live together.
W. C. Williams, “The Ivory Crown”
It was what haunted me as a newlywed,
how in the final scene of the musical
Stop the World I Want to Get Off
when the hero is old, he sings regrets
for not loving his wife more wholeheartedly,
for not knowing love lay in his own bed,
and I thought this is what it comes to
when a man’s power, the stack of his desires
gets spent like money in a poker game
and it’s time to go home: he has her waiting:
the unconditional Mrs. I wasn’t she.
Like him I was restless to rack up history.
One summer my husband and I were flying
west—he’d sold his business,
I’d begun to write—and as we approached
a runway, I felt something mighty
in our gait—a wedding moment—
as if we had inherited the kingdom:
King and Queen, proud and whole—a birth—
and we were about to claim it:
the good marriage, better than
before, not my parents sixty long-
suffering years, not the power behind
a throne, but each of us full of life, having made it.
Now, near seventy, there’s sadness—
which is not regret—at the flatness of the bed.
What was novel, c’est fini. Unless…
unless we uncover intimacy? Some mystery
which may lie where we no longer labor
or will it—like tears at a sappy movie.
There, safely harbored in the dark, we
let ourselves cry without drowning.
Loneliness and Plenty: On a Safari in Africa
An elephant walks in front of our van—
be quiet, make no sudden movement—
one after another others
follow: into the river
bulls and cows and babies,
unconcerned by us, go at it:
males spar clacking tusks, babies roll
in mud, one lifts its trunk aside
to nurse at its mother’s teat, and females,
looking like my Tante Annie, throw water
up on their bellies—(ahh! A machaiah!)—
hundreds of elephants, for over an hour.
They keep coming. We sit, surrounded.
*
Arriving at our camp we’ve hardly time
to settle before drinks around the fire
when in the dark a Kenyan in softest
voice addresses me—Madam—offering
a bowl of potato chips. Scotch and potato chips.
And dinner, five courses, in a tent.
Only my husband’s soused, asleep
at the table. I want him to taste
the peanut soup, to hear the air
alive on the tarp.
I want him to touch me.
This trip began on a map, he and I
finding Lamu, Lewa Downs, Samburu,
marveling at their imprint under our hands.
*
Loneliness can come in the middle of beauty,
In the middle of people, even on a familiar road.
*
A flock of quelea float above the fever trees. (Touch me—
put your palm to my cheek)
His camera aims at waterbuck,
click clicks an eland
poised in sight—on this teeming earth
we do not look at each other or outward together
to offer ourselves to a hillside—let’s go to it,
pretend it’s a breast, its nipple that acacia
spreading as we move towards it, lean against
bark roughness. Let me kiss the tip of
your thumb, wet it, mark our tree.
*
We have traveled a long way to this
wildebeest, bloody afterbirth
hanging from her as she rises, hyena
hiding in wait. You and I;
I’m afraid we will die
at each other’s hands.
Myra Shapiro’s poems, essays and stories have appeared in Harvard Review, CALYX, The Ohio Review, Ploughshares and numerous other anthologies. Yosef Kumunyakaa recently selected a poem of Myra’s that appeared in Rattapallax, for inclusion in The Best American Poetry, 2003. She has received The Dylan Thomas Poetry Award and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Blue Sofa Press published her book of poems, I’ll See You Thursday. She is currently working on a memoir, Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York.
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