Friday, January 02, 2009

For Desire - Kim Addonizio



Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look

- Kim Addonizio

3 comments:

Unknown said...

you have 2 typos in this wonderful poem: line 6-- love-->lover; line 25 left-->let

love love love kim addonizio!!! i've met her 3 times-- and i will see her read again at the end of april at the LATimes festival of books! woot!

Katie McClendon said...

thanks amanda! i fixed the typos. that's what i get for copying and pasting poems from other blogs instead of buying the books myself. sigh.

Talisa said...

excellent poem
to be read aloud
thanks for posting it
xxoo t