What Is This Thing Called Love

Kim Addonizio

Cover

Title Page

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE

kim addonizio

w. w. norton & company new york london

Dedication

DEDICATION

For Robert—
lightning twice

Epigraph

EPIGRAPH

The wind was shaking me all night long;

shaking me in my sleep

like a definition of love,

saying, this is the moment,

here, now.

—Ruth Stone, “Green Apples”

The blues are the true facts of life.

—Willie Dixon

ONE

First Kiss

FIRST KISS

Afterwards you had that drunk, drugged look

my daughter used to get, when she had let go

of my nipple, her mouth gone slack and her eyes

turned vague and filmy, as though behind them

the milk was rising up to fill her

whole head, that would loll on the small

white stalk of her neck so I would have to hold her

closer, amazed at the sheer power

of satiety, which was nothing like the needing

to be fed, the wild flailing and crying until she fastened

herself to me and made the seal tight

between us, and sucked, drawing the liquid down and

out of my body; no, this was the crowning

moment, this giving of herself, knowing

she could show me how helpless

she was—that’s what I saw, that night when you

pulled your mouth from mine and

leaned back against a chain-link fence,

in front of a burned-out church: a man

who was going to be that vulnerable,

that easy and impossible to hurt.

Stolen Moments

STOLEN MOMENTS

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best

in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin

unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge

lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin

membrane between us, the exquisite orange,

tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,

the way he pushed me up against the fridge—

Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss

that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin

flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s

merciless, the way it travels in

and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove

we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers

on the table. And we still had hours.

Blues for Dante Alighieri

BLUES FOR DANTE ALIGHIERI

. . . without hope we live on in desire . . .

Inferno, IV

Our room was too small, the sheets scratchy and hot—

Our room was a kind of hell, we thought,

and killed a half-liter of Drambuie we’d bought.

We walked over the Arno and back across.

We walked all day, and in the evening, lost,

argued and wandered in circles. At last

we found our hotel. The next day we left for Rome.

We found the Intercontinental, and a church full of bones,

and ate takeout Chinese in our suite, alone.

It wasn’t a great journey, only a side trip.

It wasn’t love for eternity, or any such crap;

it was just something that happened . . .

We packed suitcases, returned the rental car.

We packed souvenirs, repaired to the airport bar

and talked about pornography, and movie stars.

What Was

WHAT WAS

The streets fill with cabs and limos,

with the happy laughter of the very drunk;

the benches in Washington Square Park,

briefly occupied by lovers, have been reclaimed

by men who stretch out coughing under the Chronicle.

We’re sitting on the cold slab

of a cathedral step, and to keep myself

from kissing you I stare at the cartoony

blue neon face of a moose, set over the eponymous

restaurant, and decide on self-pity

as the best solution to this knot

of complicated feelings. So much, my love,

for love; our years together recede,

taillights in the fog that’s settled in. I breathe

your familiar smell—Tuscany Per Uomo,

Camel Lights, the sweet reek of alcohol—and keep

from looking at your face, knowing

I’m still a sucker for beauty. Nearby, a man decants

a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way

through a tune meant to be melancholy. Soon

I’ll drive home alone, weeping and raging,

the radio twisted high as I can stand it—

or else I’ll lean toward you, and tell you

any lie I think will bring you back.

And if you’re reading this, it’s been years

since then, and everything’s too late

the way it always is in songs like this,

the way it always is.

So What

SO WHAT

Guess what. If love is only chemistry—

phenylethylamine, that molecule

that dizzies up the brain’s back room, smoky

with hot bebop, it won’t be long until

a single worker’s mopping up the scuffed

and littered floor, whistling tunelessly,

each endorphin cooling like a snuffed

glass candle, the air stale with memory.

So what, you say; outside, a shadow lifts

a trumpet from its case, lifts it like an ingot

and scatters a few virtuosic riffs

toward the locked-down stores. You’ve quit

believing that there’s more, but you’re still stirred

enough to stop, and wait, listening hard.

31-Year-Old Lover

31-YEAR-OLD LOVER

When he takes off his clothes

I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped,

the milky, lubricious smoothness of it

when it’s taken from the fridge still hard

the way his body is hard, the high

tight pectorals, the new dimes of the nipples pressed

into his chest, the fanning of the muscles underneath.

I look at his arms, shaped as though a knife

has slid along the curves to carve them out,

deltoids, biceps, triceps, I almost can’t believe

that he is human—latissimus dorsi, hip flexors,

gluteals, gastrocnemius—he is so perfectly made.

He stands naked in my bedroom and nothing

has harmed him yet, though he is going

to be harmed. He is going to have a gut one day,

and wiry gray hairs where the soft dark filaments

flow out of him, the cream of his skin is going

to loosen and separate slowly, over a low steady flame

and he has no idea, as I had no idea,

and I am not going to speak of this to him ever,

I am going to let him stretch out on my bed

so I can take the heavy richness of him in

and in, I am going to have it back the only way I can.

Muse

MUSE

When I walk in,

men buy me drinks before I even reach the bar.

They fall in love with me after one night,

even if we never touch.

I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.

They sweat with my memory,

alone in cheap rooms they listen

to moans through the wall

and wonder if that’s me,

letting out a scream as the train whines by.

But I’m already two states away, lying with a boy

I let drink rain from the pulse at my throat.

No one leaves me, I’m the one that chooses.

I show up like money on the sidewalk.

Listen, baby. Those are my high heels dangling from the phone wire.

I’m the crow flapping down,

that’s my black slip

you catch sight of when the pain

twists into you so deep

you have to close your eyes and weep like a goddamned woman.

You Don’t Know What Love Is

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.

Blues for Roberto

BLUES FOR ROBERTO

It’s an ugly circus, to leave you again.

It’s a carnival act: bound, chained

underwater in a glass tank, near-drowned,

I’ve gotten free. I’m incredible.

I’ve gotten so good I’m terrible.

Bring on the elephants, their great legs hobbled.

Bring on a lion, I’ll feed it my head.

Bring a small scrap of paper to wipe up the blood.

I’ll hang myself from the high wire, nude . . .

Once you loved me, but walked away.

Once was too often, for a girl like me—

Since then I’ve made you pay and pay.

Don’t call me, ever. I’ll tell you I’m sorry.

Don’t call me, I tell you; it’s boring, boring

always to leap to the end of the story.

And this is the end. I’m leaving town.

This is the end: the tents torn down,

the animals making caged animal sounds.

Ever After: A Paradelle

EVER AFTER: A PARADELLE

He lies on his side like a glass knocked over.

Only a little sweetness left, poor boy.

Only his little lies, a glass-like sweetness.

Poor he, a left boy knocked over on side.

Now she loves him more, but won’t come back.

In dreams she cries and paints his face like a girl’s.

A girl’s more in dreams. She won’t like him now,

but loves his face. Come back, she paints and cries.

It rains and falls dark on the house they lived in together.

She is alone there, afraid when it falls and breaks over the roof.

It is on the roof. Rains and falls. The house afraid

when it lived alone. There she breaks and falls over in dark.

Now, in the dark, he dreams.

She is like a sweetness in his side; she loves him back.

But it paints more lies. Afraid, his face won’t come together.

Little boy lived there on and on alone, only a girl’s poor roof

knocked over. When it breaks, the house cries like they left.

She rains. And a glass falls and falls.

note: for an explanation of the paradelle form, see Billy Collins’s “Paradelle for Susan” in his book Picnic, Lightning.

Sonnenizio on a Line from Drayton

SONNENIZIO ON A LINE FROM DRAYTON

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;

or kiss anyway, let’s start with that, with the kissing part,

because it’s better than the parting part, isn’t it—-

we’re good at kissing, we like how that part goes:

we part our lips, our mouths get near and nearer,

then we’re close, my breasts, your chest, our bodies partway

to making love, so we might as well, part of me thinks—

the wrong part, I know, the bad part, but still

let’s pretend we’re at that party where we met

and scandalized everyone, remember that part? Hold me

like that again, unbutton my shirt, part of you

wants to I can tell, I’m touching that part and it says

yes, the ardent partisan, let it win you over,

it’s hopeless, come, we’ll kiss and part forever.

note: The sonnenizio was invented in Florence in the thirteenth century by Vanni Fucci as an irreverent form whose subject was usually the impossibility of everlasting love. Dante retaliated by putting Fucci into the seventh chasm of the Inferno as a thief. Originally composed in hendecasyllabics, the sonnenizio gradually moved away from metrical constraints and began to tackle a wider variety of subject matter. The sonnenizio is fourteen lines long. It opens with a line from someone else’s sonnet, repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet.

Ex-boyfriends

EX-BOYFRIENDS

They hang around, hitting on your friends

or else you never hear from them again.

They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,

they’re passing through town and want dinner,

they take your hand across the table, kiss you

when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,

your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over

you now. One writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you

is the first to be sadistically dismembered

by a serial killer. They’re getting married

and want you to be the first to know,

or they’ve been fired and need a loan,

their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don’t miss you but show up

in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes

where they’re buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,

propped on an elbow, giving you a look

of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe

I’ve found you. It’s the same way

your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,

before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark

broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs

of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,

hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,

following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

Dance

DANCE

When you are finally, magically, able to clone

yourself into several identical women,

so that each one can move toward a man

who’s been waiting for his turn

to come around for the first time, or maybe again,

won’t you be happy then,

all of you together in a lustrous ballroom,

each woman wearing her distinguishing number,

the judges scoring everyone the same, music spilling

from the bandstand, the men thrilled

to be near you, each one whispering

a different pet name, each one polishing

with his black shoes a perfect circle of floor

while he raises you up, holding your

hips in his hands, gazing at you with his brown

or mottled green eyes, looking down

with his startling blue ones, taking you into a corner

then spinning you out toward the center

where the light from the mirrorball

splinters over your skin, sidereal

as your sequined dress, and you feel

as complete as you’ll ever feel,

moving through all your true and beautiful lives

while the real one pales.

TWO

Death Poem

DEATH POEM

Do I have to bring it up again, isn’t there another subject?

Can I forget about the scrap of flattened squirrel fur

fluttering on the road, can I forget the road

and how I can’t stop driving no matter what,

not even for gas, or love, can I please not think

about my father left in some town behind me,

in his blue suit, with his folded hands,

and my grandmother moaning about her bladder

and swallowing all the pills, and the towns I’m passing now

can I try not to see them, the children squatting

by the ditches, the holes in their chests and foreheads,

the woman cradling her tumor, the dog dragging its crippled hips?

I can close my eyes and sit back if I want to,

I can lean against my friends’ shoulders

and eat as they’re eating, and drink from the bottle

being passed back and forth; I can lighten up, can’t I,

Christ, can’t I? There is another subject, in a minute

I’ll think of it. I will. And if you know it, help me.

Help me. Remind me why I’m here.

Scary Movies

SCARY MOVIES

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,

and I keep expecting some enormous

black-and-white B-movie Cyclops

to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean

and drag me from my kitchen

to the deep cave that flickered

into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless

between my older brothers, pumped up

on candy and horror—that cave,

the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,

I can smell their stench as clearly

as the bacon fat from breakfast. This

is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is

that helps you get up in the morning

and actually leave the house

on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform

is cruising his panel truck

of packages through your neighborhood.

I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—

Hi, I’m not here—

the morning of her funeral,

the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,

and I feel as afraid as I was

after all those vampire movies

when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,

unable to get up

even to pee because the undead

were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare

foot out there in the unprotected air

they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me

under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older

I would know better, and now

they’re dead, and I’m older,

and I know better.

Dead Girls

DEAD GIRLS

show up often in the movies, facedown

in the weeds beside the highway.

Kids find them by the river, or in the woods,

under leaves, one pink-nailed hand thrust up.

Detectives stand over them in studio apartments

or lift their photos off pianos

in the houses they almost grew up in.

A dead girl can kick a movie into gear

better than a saloon brawl, better

than a factory explosion, just

by lying there. Anyone can play her,

any child off the street

can be hog-tied and dumped from a van

or strangled blue in a kitchen, a bathroom,

an alley, a school. That’s the beauty

of a dead girl. Even a plain one

who feels worthless

as a clod of dirt, broken

by the sorrow of gazing all day

at a fashion magazine,

can be made whole, redeemed

by what she finally can’t help being,

the center of attention, the special,

desirable, dead, dead girl.

Echo and Narcissus

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

Poor love-struck Echo, stuck with repeating

everything he said. He might

have thought he deserved it,

to have a nymph for a girlfriend, who’d confirm

everything he said; he might

have loved how she mirrored him,

a girlfriend who’d say You’re pretty

when he told her she was pretty,

who’d love him more than her mirror.

Not that they had mirrors in those days;

that was the problem. Anyway, she was pretty,

but he wasn’t interested in nymphs.

If only they’d had mirrors in those days

he wouldn’t have drowned in that reflecting pool,

finding it more interesting than nymphs.

But maybe he’d have hit his head against a mirror

if there’d been one instead of a pool, and died anyway.

No free will in those days—it was all the gods.

You could beat your head against your fate, but still,

if you were Narcissus, you’d end up a white flower

stuck in the ground with no will, plucked or trampled by gods,

and someone would say it was deserved,

for beauty to come down to a white flower,

a poor echo, and someone’s love stuck

in the ground, the ground, the ground, the ground.

Eating Together

EATING TOGETHER

I know my friend is going,

though she still sits there

across from me in the restaurant,

and leans over the table to dip

her bread in the oil on my plate; I know

how thick her hair used to be,

and what it takes for her to discard

her man’s cap partway through our meal,

to look straight at the young waiter

and smile when he asks

how we are liking it. She eats

as though starving—chicken, dolmata,

the buttery flakes of filo—

and what’s killing her

eats, too. I watch her lift

a glistening black olive and peel

the meat from the pit, watch

her fine long fingers, and her face,

puffy from medication. She lowers

her eyes to the food, pretending

not to know what I know. She’s going.

And we go on eating.

Cat Poem

CAT POEM

The cat’s hardly moving; she’s stopped eating, stopped shitting, she puts her face to a bowl of water

but doesn’t drink. My friend says not to write about her, he says no one wants to read about my pet

so let’s say it’s your cat, not mine, or maybe you have a dog; even I, a cat owner, think that dogs

are superior, they have such compassionate eyes. Once, an actor—not just any actor, but Al Pacino—

did an entire stage performance keeping in mind the liquid brown eyes of someone

in the audience, playing to those eyes, and when the house lights went up he realized

it was a guide dog, a German Shepherd, so maybe if you imagine your dog or even better

Al Pacino’s dog, hardly moving, its ribs heaving, that would be preferable, but if you don’t

like dogs maybe a bird will do, or whales, people seem to care about the whales, lying on their great sides

on the beach, or the seals with their skulls crushed by clubs—think of them, their orphaned pups—

or just forget about the animals entirely; forget the beagles smoking while they run on treadmills

and those rabbits the cosmetic companies seem to favor, though it’s harder to discount

the chimpanzees injected with simian AIDS, unless maybe the retrovirus inhabiting your friend

has just become immune to the protease inhibitors, so forget the chimpanzees, too,

remember my cat? She’s lying on the bathroom rug, her organs shutting down—imagine I wept

all day for her—Vanilla is her name, my daughter named her at five, now my daughter’s grown,

now the cat’s old, I’ve put her on the bed and I’m talking to her, saying It’s all right,

go if you need to, and I’m watching death—he’s stroking her fur, making his rounds,

he’s talking to her softly, telling her to stop, ignoring me for now, ignoring you.

Noir

NOIR

Everybody dies, Bob Roberts, the crooked fight promoter,

tells Charlie Davis early in Body and Soul,

and it’s the line Charlie throws back at him

like a perfect counterpunch at the close of the film.

The fix was in—go the distance and lose the decision—

but Charlie refused to take a dive,

thereby losing sixty grand but regaining his soul

and his long-suffering true love. What’re you gonna do,

kill me? Everybody dies, Charlie says, and he

and his true love go laughing into the final frame.

In the alternate ending, written but never shot,

Charlie’s killed and stuffed into a trashcan. What difference

if the audience leaves the theater believing

Charlie’s still out there somewhere,

working a cash register like his mother

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