The Rumor About the True Things

Young women with the baby fat
still on them, smelling of milk.
Against that, her bravery--
striding out of bed in the morning,
her years, her children underfoot,
her blue eyes flashing warning.

"I could make some of these guys very happy,"
she said, looking up from the personals
in the New York Review of Books.

You read to her of war,
devastation, gut-chilling
insecurity, and her blue eyes
waver, and she sleeps
like an American child.

"Is this a peak experience?"
she said, sliding down beside him,
her blue eyes laughing at his desperate age.

Sound of surf through the dense fog.
Moisture streaming from the screened windows.
"Where are the beautiful love poems?"
she keeps asking him.

She became the line
he had in his head
just before sleep, that
he thought he would retain
and now it's gone.

--"Blue Eyes" by Harvey Shapiro