(I am currently working on a collection of poems about tyrants and the women who love them. This poem is the title poem of the group. Can you guess who it's about? (besides Fidel Castro) Know who the woman is? If so, email me. Good luck!)
A dance at the country club in 1953, a chance
brushing of elbows, the clink of cut crystal,
a slick, slinky mambo and some Benny Moré,
an affair studded with surgeons, lawyers
and políticos, it all sends her sprawling
down the treacherous incline of lust, a fall
from which there’s no getting back up.
On the ballroom floor, a meeting of green
eyes the color of the sea just beyond the breakers
and an educated peasant’s chin, a promontory
carpeted so long in tight, dark pubic curls
that no one remembers the Kirk Douglas cleft
or the scar etched into his jaw when he was eleven,
a bastard son’s souvenir from his father’s left hook
and a sharp silver ring.
The eyes and the chin swish and sway
through the crowd, past the martinis, the gimlets,
the rum cocktails, the filmy bubbles of gossip
that pop and blow on the wind of conversation.
All it takes is the dull repetition of days
and nights for a doctor’s young, elastic wife to stray
from the infinite languid line she walks between
who she is and what she wants.
She’s hooked from the first moment
he reaches out and reels her in, a luscious, desperate
fish on a short line, from the first dip when the floor
brushes past – and misses – her careful coiffure.
She craves his difference, his certainty, his fugitive
status; she crumples when the police arrive,
and he disappears.
For two years they write, the bastard and the socialite,
with a devotion the Brownings would admire. He by
matchlight from a solitary cell, with only cucarachas
for company, and she, between engagements, from her
beachfront mansion, which she knows is just a cloister
of another kind.
The letters tempt and persuade; they promise everything.
Their words leap off fine linen stationery, rolling paper,
ad pages furtively ripped from the occasional magazine;
they tighten around her throat like a noose until she can’t
swallow or breathe, they surround his balls and squeeze
him to the floor in one long groan of enchanted agony.
This is love, this startling pain, this intangible brew of untested chemistry.
When he arrives at her door one afternoon, it’s as though
she has been waiting for him, pacing the widow’s walk high
above the street, casting an eye for a light, a signal, any sign of life.
He nourishes her neglected body, French in his attention to detail
but Latin in his impassioned humping and thumping,
in the way he growls out her name over and over.
Before he leaves, before her husband returns
she gives him money and a key to the front door, whispers
that she’ll sell the emeralds, her wedding ring, the sapphire jewelry.
She won’t need those baubles in El Máximo’s just, new paradise.
She’s on his side of the trench now, a drummer for the cause.
© Cristina Adams 2009
