She Journeys

The whole day inside me

The Shipfitter's Wife
Dorianne Laux

I loved him most when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat,
smelling of salt the drying weeds
of the ocean. I'd go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
annointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I'd open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me -- the ship's
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

I came across this poem in a book I was given at work, an editor's proof of a poetry collection called Love Poems for Real Life. It is rare that I find myself so moved by a poem (despite being a poet myself), but this one... I can feel these lines just as surely as I feel the pinch of my nails into my palm.

Last night was a black night. It shouldn't have been... who can suffer in the wake of an evening of ABBA? It's been so long since I have had a really "good" cry, and I suppose it's going to be a long time coming. My tears last night were the cowardly kind, silent, slipped under my pillow. Ah, such despair. I was laying in bed, on my back, listening to Josh Rouse and finding it difficult to breathe, feeling like the pinkest parts of me I've come to love, my giddy laugh, my idealism, my romantic hopes for the future, rot and blacken like a thirteen-day-old corpse in one of those environmentally friendly cemeteries they have in the states now. I felt like if I were to get up and walk across the room I'd leave a trail of all my dead pieces, and that I would be all the better for simply mopping the pieces up and flushing them down the toilet instead of trying to press them back into their places.

posted by TriptychChick @ 9:18 PM