Free Verse Poem by Margaret D. Stetz
he mounted the undusted stairs to that studio where sofa and bed folded into each other’s arms she followed eagerly You’ve bearded me in my den he sighed naming her as the hunter yes she was hunting trophies those towers of books swaying vertiginously in every corner like the skyline of Manhattan she hoped to embrace MOMA/the Met/Lincoln Center when he held her the hotplate next to the bathroom where he folded a perfect omelet her tongue on his lips licking the taste of Paris (and in winter didn’t he wear a beret with his trench coat?) As The Poet says his vowels carved by London he quoted Hopkins/Browning/Tennyson (was it a bad sign, that line from “Tithonus” about being immortal but old too old?) it was her mistake to think she was Jo March/Jane Eyre/Dorothea Brooke she wanted to climb into bed with the 42nd Street Library but young too young for life in the stacks for statuesque calm too impatient for Patience too flighty for Fortitude for boredom induced by quotations Let us go then, you and I he often repeated but stayed like a weathered sculpture affixed to its plinth when she woke and left.
Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, as well as a widely published poet. She has spent her life teaching and writing about literature, but still finds it hard to reconcile academia with the world she knew as a working-class girl in Queens, New York.
