Robin Carstensen teaches creative writing and literature at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Her most recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Humanities Review, the Georgetown Review, Terrain.org: a Journal of the Built and Natural Environments, and many others. ---------
Voyeurs
I bathe between the mullions, in the evening dust
spinning through the ribbons of library windows.
The universe is taking notes, lighting a candle,
putting on Barry White.
There is a red velvet canopy bed down a long dark corridor,
but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I walk over to your cubicle. Do you have an eraser?
You look up from your words, unstartled,
as if words could be more interesting than doves
cooing on a warm window ledge in September.
You open your satchel. Reach. Take this,
you say, lifting the thin yellow shaft
as if you are about to knight me, so I bow my head,
twirl the pencil, examine the eraser
between thumb and forefinger, overtaken
by a sudden peckishness for pink nubs.
You don’t respond. Cool as an oasis. Speak again
please: save me from the Victorian boudoir in my head.
It’s not too much to ask. We all need saving
from beds we’ve made, in or out of our heads,
from thirst and falling, the grand old party, shipwrecks,
and other catastrophes.
You are sturdy and occupied, and I am grasping
a handful of your thick, dark hair while you let me
push you down on the red velvet canopy bed,
or you push me, hell, we’ll take turns
between all the pressing, the unbuttoning,
the urging, the what-are-you-reading.
What am I, oh, you are talking about books
while I am slipping off … now you speak
of your Chicana book, Gloria Anzaldúa’s
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”
Yes, it is hard to tame a wild tongue, I say,
lips parched, breath caught—the library a borderland,
a jungle, apparently. I want to be Tarzan. No, Jane. No,
Tarzan, thump my chest, swing from tree to tree,
all this wild uncertainty, this constant no guarantees,
all of this too shall pass. I want a book of promises.
I want to catch the light in your eyes, sweeping
the long dark passages off their feet.