Read Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy for Free Online Page A

world and its pallid angels
    swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
    I want this world. I want to walk into
    the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
    like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
    and I want to resist it. I want to go
    staggering and flailing my way
    through the bars and back rooms,
    through the gleaming hotels and the weedy
    lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
    where dogs are let off their leashes
    in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
    other and roll together in the grass, I want to
    lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
    it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
    and put on that little black dress and wait
    for you, yes you, to come over here
    and get down on your knees and tell me
    just how fucking good I look.
    KIM ADDONIZIO

You Don’t Know What Love Is
    but you know how to raise it in me
    like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
    wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
    How to start clean. This love even sits up
    and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
    Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
    to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
    to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
    where she can drink and get sick and then
    dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
    where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up
    with an ache she can’t locate and no money
    and a terrible thirst. So to hell
    with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
    and your tongue down my throat
    like an oxygen tube. Cover me
    in black plastic. Let the mourners through.
    KIM ADDONIZIO

Atlas
    There is a kind of love called maintenance,
    Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it; 
    Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
    The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs; 
    Which answers letters; which knows the way
    The money goes; which deals with dentists 
    And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
    And postcards to the lonely; which upholds 
    The permanently ricketty elaborate
    Structures of living; which is Atlas. 
    And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
    Which knows what time and weather are doing
    To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
    Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
    My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
    My suspect edifice upright in air,
    As Atlas did the sky. 
    U.A. FANTHORPE

Love Song: I and Thou
    Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
        the studs are bowed, the joists
    are shaky by nature, no piece fits
        any other piece without a gap
    or pinch, and bent nails
        dance all over the surfacing
    like maggots. By Christ
        I am no carpenter. I built
    the roof for myself, the walls
        for myself, the floors
    for myself, and got
        hung up in it myself. I
    danced with a purple thumb
        at this house-warming, drunk
    with my prime whiskey: rage.
        Oh I spat rage’s nails
    into the frame-up of my work:
        it held. It settled plumb,
    level, solid, square and true
        for that great moment. Then
    it screamed and went on through,
        skewing as wrong the other way.
    God damned it. This is hell,
        but I planned it, I sawed it,
    I nailed it, and I
        will live in it until it kills me.
    I can nail my left palm
        to the left-hand crosspiece but
    I can’t do everything myself.
        I need a hand to nail the right,
    a help, a love, a you, a wife.
    ALAN DUGAN

Wedding
    From time to time our love is like a sail
    and when the sail begins to alternate
    from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
    and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
    and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
    like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
    to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
    and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions
    and this, my love, when millions come and go
    beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
    and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
    tiptoeing on a rope, which is like luck;
    and when