friday “refrains” · don share
Friday 28 September 2007 | I like a cookie
My former Partisan Review bitchin’ buddy Don Share has so many great new poems in his recent book Squandermania that I feel almost guilty posting one from his first book, Union. But it’s one of my all-time favorites, and I mean all-time, as in Auden and Hardy and Frost and Yeats. It’s infinitely memorizable and to me that bespeaks being therefore worthy, and not only of my precious increasingly estrogen-depleted brain space. So more and newer Don at another time; but for now, this. PS: I still can’t figure out how to put tabs in CSS. So whenever there’s an non-capitalized line, exert yourself and imagine a one-inch indentation. Share (ar ar) and enjoy!
REFRAINS
So I broke our wedding vows,
Which, I realize,
Have no if’s, but’s, or and-how’s;
But her eyes
Grew hard as quartz:
Her eyes were broken hearts.
I am odd, and getting older.
Maybe the secret of love is to let
It get, like the unscalable peaks, colder.
She was my hottest thing, my tropics, and yet—
Each season passes. But to forget
Her is impossible no matter how long ago
It was she got wind of this, and let me go.
Time is passing boring.
And for all my whoring
And point-scoring, and the scolding, and lurid
luring of me
She did during her leaving me, I see
That a single vain year has come and gone
Since the time I went back to, as in cradle, lying alone.
I am odd, and getting on.
Certain as rain,
The kind of recurrent pain
A woman receives from the storming man.
What does he do but go on in this vein,
Yelling, surging, inserting and asserting
wherever he can?
Time rains; it rains.
Still the fever runs along my veins—
I am a donor; a bleeder, a waiter-in-vain, for love’s
sickled banns.
When cocks go up, down go the brains,
So the gypsy proverb goes; born in caravans,
My fathers’ blood ran hot and cold; when they suffered,
they suffered in refrains.
—Don Share
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