Woman

"All things become thee, being thine," I think sometimes 
As I think of you. I think: "How many faults 
In thee have seemed a virtue!" While your taste is on my tongue 
The years return, blessings innumerable 
As the breaths that you have quickened, gild my flesh. 
Lie there in majesty! 

         When, like Disraeli, I murmur 
That you are more like a mistress than a wife, 
More like an angel than a mistress; when, like Satan, 
I hiss in your ear some vile suggestion, 
Some delectable abomination, 
You smile at me indulgently: "Men, men!" 

You smile at mankind, recognizing in it 
The absurd occasion of your fall. 
For men—as your soap operas, as your Home Journals, 
As your hearts whisper—men are only children. 
And you believe them. Truly, you are children. 

Should I love you so dearly if you weren't? 
If I weren't? 

      O morning star, 
Each morning my dull heart goes out to you 
And rises with the sun, but with the sun 
Sets not, but all the long night nests within your eyes. 

Men's share of grace, of all that can make bearable, 
Lovable almost, the apparition, Man, 
Has fallen to you. Erect, extraordinary 
As a polar bear on roller skates, he passes 
On into the Eternal …

          From your pedestal, you watch 
Admiringly, when you remember to. 

Let us form, as Freud has said, "a group of two." 
You are the best thing that this world can offer— 
He said so. Or I remember that he said so; 
If I am mistaken it's a Freudian error, 
An error nothing but a man would make. 
Women can't bear women. Cunningly engraved 
On many an old wife's dead heart is "Women, 
Beware women!" And yet it was a man 
Sick of too much sweetness—of a life 
Rich with a mother, wife, three daughters, a wife's sister, 
An abyss of analysands—who wrote: "I cannot 
Escape the notion (though I hesitate 
To give it expression) that for women 
The level of what is ethically normal 
Is different from what it is in men. 
Their superego"—he goes on without hesitation—
"Is never so inexorable, so impersonal, 
So independent of its emotional 
Origins as we require it in a man." 

Did not the angel say to Abraham 
That he would spare the cities of the plain 
If there were found in them ten unjust women? 
—That is to say, merciful; that is to say, 
Extravagant; that is to say, unjust as judges 
Who look past judgment, always, to the eyes 
(Long-lashed, a scapegoat's, yearning sheepishly) 
Under the curly-yarned and finger-tickling locks 
Of that dear-wooled, inconsequential head. 

You save him and knit an afghan from his hair. 

And in the cold tomb, save for you, and afghanless, 
He leaves you to wage wars, build bridges, visit women 
Who like to run their fingers through his hair.
He complains of you to them, describing you 
As "the great love of my life." What pains it took 
To win you, a mere woman!—"worst of all," 
He ends, "a woman who was not my type." 

But then, a woman never is a man's type. 
Possessed by that prehistoric unforgettable 
Other One, who never again is equalled 
By anyone, he searches for his ideal, 
The Good Whore who reminds him of his mother. 
The realities are too much one or the other, 
Too much like Mother or too bad … Too bad! 

He resigns himself to them—as "they are, after all, 
The best things that are offered in that line"; 
And should he not spare Ninevah, that city 
Wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons 
Who cannot tell their left hand from their right, 
But smile up hopefully at the policeman? 

Are you as mercenary as the surveys show? 
What a way to put it! Let us write instead 
That you are realists; or, as a realist might say, 
Naturalists. It's in man's nature—woman's nature 
To want the best, and to be careless how it comes. 
And what have we all to sell except ourselves? 
Poor medlar, no sooner ripe than rotten! 
You must be seized today, or stale tomorrow 
Into a wife, a mother, a homemaker, 
An Elector of the League of Women Voters. 
Simply by your persistence, you betray 
Yourselves and all that was yours, you momentary 
And starry instances; are falling, falling 
Into the sagging prison of your flesh, 
Residuary legatees of earth, grandmothers 
And legal guardians of the tribes of men. 
If all Being showered down on you in gold 
Would you not murmur, with averted breasts: "Not now"?
When he looks upon your nakedness he is blinded. 
Your breasts and belly are one incandescence 
Like the belly of an idol: how can a man go in that fire 
And come out living? "The burnt child dreads the fire," 
He says later, warming his hands before the fire. 
Last—last of all—he says that there are three things sure: 
"That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her 
  Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the 
  Fire." 

Part of himself is shocked at part of himself 
As, beside the remnants of a horrible 
Steak, a little champagne, he confesses 
Candidly to you: "In the beginning 
There was a baby boy that loved its mother, 
There was a baby girl that loved its mother. 
The boy grew up and got to love a woman, 
The girl grew up and had to love a man. 
Because isn't that what's wrong with women? Men? 
Isn't that the reason you're the way you are? 
Why are you the way you are?" 
  
            You say: "Because." 
  
When you float with me through the Tunnel of Love 
Or Chamber of Horrors—one of those concessions—
And a great hand, dripping, daggered, reaches out for you 
And you scream, and it misses, and another hand, 
Soiled, hairy, lustful, reaches out for you 
And you faint, and it misses: when you come to, 
You say, looking up weakly: "Did you notice? 
The second one had on a wedding ring." 
  
May the Devil fly away with the roof of the house 
That you and I aren't happy in, you angel! 
  
And yet, how quickly the bride's veils evaporate!
  
A girl hesitates a moment in mid-air 
And settles to the ground a wife, a mother. 
Each evening a tired spirit visits 
Her full house; wiping his feet upon a mat 
Marked Women and Children First, the husband looks 
At this grown woman. She stands there in slacks 
Among the real world's appliances, 
Women, and children; kisses him hello 
Just as, that morning, she kissed him goodbye, 
And he sits down, till dinner, with the paper. 
This home of theirs is haunted by a girl's 
Ghost. At sunset a woodpecker knocks 
At a tree by the window, asking their opinion 
Of life. The husband answers, "Life is life," 
And when his wife calls to him from the kitchen 
He tells her who it was, and what he wanted. 
Beating the whites of seven eggs, the beater 
Asks her her own opinion; she says, "Life 
Is life." "See how it sounds to say it isn't," 
The beater tempts her. "Life is not life," 
She says. It sounds the same. Putting her cake 
Into the oven, she is satisfied 
Or else dissatisfied: it sounds the same. 
With knitted brows, with care's swift furrows nightly 
Smoothed out with slow care, and come again with care 
Each morning, she lives out her gracious life. 
  
But you should gush out over being like a spring 
The drinker sighs to lift his mouth from: a dark source 
That brims over, with its shining, every cup 
That is brought to it in shadow, filled there, broken there. 
You look at us out of sunlight and of shade, 
Dappled, inexorable, the last human power. 
All earth is the labyrinth along whose ways 
You walk mirrored: rosy-fingered, many-breasted 
As Diana of the Ephesians, strewing garments 
Before the world's eyes narrowed in desire. 
Now, naked on my doorstep, in the sun 
Gold-armed, white-breasted, pink-cheeked, and black-furred, 
You call to me, "Come"; and when I come say, "Go," 
Smiling your soft contrary smile …
                 He who has these 
Is secure from the other sorrows of the world. 
While you are how am I alone? Your voice 
Soothes me to sleep, and finds fault with my dreams, 
Till I murmur in my sleep: "Man is the animal 
That finds fault." 
  
        And you say: "Who said that?" 
  
But be, as you have been, my happiness; 
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon; 
When, starting from my dreams, I groan to you,
May your I love you send me back to sleep. 
At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring, 
The heavens' sun perfected in your eyes.