Poem of the Week

Curious, I Go to Her Website

Lorrie Goldensohn

My stomach plunging in dread,

I went to the website of the dead woman

who broke up my marriage in 1968.

I look at this distinctive, appealing face

and imagine clearly the moment

when across from his desk, or out walking

on campus, in step beside him, her

profile suddenly so precious to him,

he fell in love with her. She

has a quiet, orderly manner. She

listens to him as I have not. And

in the nude, half nude, and dressed

self-portraits making up the daily work

of an anguished year in her life—I have

to admit her courage and her artistry. Hers:

a body whose attractions I gulp to admit

were greater than mine. Those waves

of pain that swamped me when I first

read and recognized how his poems of climax

with her may have marked both the lawless

burn and the bitter exaltation of joy

never experienced with me

or with anyone else ever again.

The tears I felt then return to my face now.

Hardly jealousy that I feel—it is

an abandonment and desolation—my deep

and savage erasure. And yet

I feel no hatred for this beautiful woman.

Nor hatred of the dead man

for having left me. I have my sins

toward him with which to contend. I

would like to travel from the planet

swiftly—rise from my chair and fly

right out the window where hanging

and dangling above all the little streets

and their windows I could see

both inside and out of the houses

with their beds and bedrooms,

and all the people fucking in them—

and they would be so tiny to me

so pitiful and in a place

where I could love them all—I who am

still alive while the dead ones

lie in their separate beds of ash. Below me

and with no power to touch or comfort.

The Yale Review · “Curious, I Go to Her Website” by Lorrie Goldensohn

how did this poem begin for you?

The poem arose from a sludge of memory holding love, loss, grief, and humiliation—all obvious. Like Chekhov, I value the reader not needing to be told that a plum is a plum and not a pumpkin. But while words floated into formation, into and out of their own space-whitened rhythm, there was the page to manage, the rhythmic pacing of the words dropping down it, the click of the mental connections, and the pealing internal rhyme of dread, bed, and dead, for instance. But opposing the fixity of typed or printed letters, now comes the varying music of the poem when spoken aloud—how to keep the lyric and still voice the mercurial tangle of the dramatic emphases the narrative requires? All this against the final need: to sequester the original impulse with its hurt, its damage intact, maybe luminous. Pain has its own beauty.

Lorrie Goldensohn is the author of two collections of poetry, The Tether and Little Fish. She retired from Vassar in 2000 and currently divides her time between Manhattan and Cabot, Vermont.