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Overview
It’s Not You, It’s Me is a poetry anthology—at once amusing, angry, sweet, and bitter—that gives a fresh voice to the all-too-familiar experience of ending a relationship. Williams has compiled over ninety poems by contemporary writers including Denis Johnson and Kim Addonizio, as well as former poets laureate Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, and Mark Strand, whose comforting and healing words dragged him out of his breakup-induced depression. We have all been through a breakup, but these poems have created an art out of heartbreak: sharing their wisdom on the pain of the flip side of romance, and poking fun at the mess we become at the mercy of love.
“This collection . . . gathers many of the poems that have helped Williams (a poet himself, with two books to his name) through his rooms of anguish over the years. Happily, they’re pretty great.” —The New York Times
“In It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup today’s big contemporary poets make breaking up and even divorce sound painfully beautiful. You’ll want to read with a box of tissues, a pint of chocolate ice cream and sappy love songs playing in the background.” —Lemon Drop Literary
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468304336 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 494 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
One Foot Out the Door
PRIVILEGE OF BEING
Robert Hass
* * *
Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy —
it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed —
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that they close their eyes again and hold each other, each feeling the mortal singularity of the body they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of coming, clutching each other with old, invented forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely companionable like the couples on the summer beach reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
SWEET RUIN
Tony Hoagland
* * *
Maybe that is what he was after,
my father, when he arranged, ten years ago,
to be discovered in a mobile home with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive,
recently divorced masseuse.
He sat there, he said later, in the middle of a red, imitation-leather sofa,
with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand,
filling up with a joyful kind of dread —
like a swamp, filling up with night,
— while my mother hammered on the trailer door with a muddy, pried-up stone,
then smashed the headlights of his car,
drove home,
and locked herself inside.
He paid the piper, was how he put it,
because he wanted to live,
and at the time knew no other way than to behave like some blind and willful beast,
— to make a huge mistake, like a big leap
into space, as if following a music that required dissonance and a plunge into the dark.
That is what he tried to tell me,
the afternoon we talked,
as he reclined in his black chair,
divorced from the people in his story by ten years and a heavy cloud of smoke.
Trying to explain how a man could come to a place where he has nothing else to gain unless he loses everything. So he louses up his work, his love, his own heart.
He hails disaster like a cab. And years later,
when the storm has descended and rubbed his face in the mud of himself,
he stands again and looks around,
strangely thankful just to be alive,
oddly jubilant — as if he had been granted the answer to his riddle,
or as if the question
had been taken back. Perhaps a wind is freshening the grass,
and he can see now, as for the first time,
the softness of the air between the blades. The pleasure built into a single bending leaf.
Maybe then he calls it, in a low voice and only to himself, Sweet Ruin.
And maybe only because I am his son,
I can hear just what he means. How even at this moment, even when the world
seems so perfectly arranged, I feel a force prepared to take it back.
Like a smudge on the horizon. Like a black spot on the heart. How one day soon,
I might take this nervous paradise,
bone and muscle of this extraordinary life,
and with one deliberate gesture,
like a man stepping on a stick,
break it into halves. But less gracefully
than that. I think there must be something wrong with me, or wrong with strength, that I would break my happiness apart simply for the pleasure of the sound.
The sound the pieces make. What is wrong
with peace? I couldn't say.
But, sweet ruin, I can hear you.
There is always the desire.
Always the cloud, suddenly present and willing to oblige.
TELL ME, BLACK HEART
Maxine Kumin
* * *
Tell me, black heart, twelve white lies.
Let separate cars be our disguise.
Unpack the thin bags of the exiled each time in the out-of-season inn where love feeds us like insulin and summer chintz is glazed and mild.
Stuff my head with alibis.
Tell me, black heart, twelve white lies.
Take two bodies, Davy Jones.
Drink them down to lazybones.
Take bourbon in a toothbrush glass while the ocean tongues the shore ten thousand times tonight before a squall drives off the striper bass and washes up new lucky stones.
Take two bodies, Davy Jones.
Small comfort that we are not drowned.
Beached and flapping, run aground,
we wake as fresh as children do.
Morning's misty, noon's a ghost.
Rain falls farther up the coast.
Checkout time is half-past two.
Lovers lie here safe and sound.
Small comfort that we are not drowned.
Tell me, black heart, twelve white lies.
Stuff my head with alibis.
Let the gusting east wind chip splinters from the opposing roof.
Let the seagulls cry reproof.
Our bed rocks like a mooring slip.
Doubt raps twice behind my eyes.
Tell me, black heart, twelve white lies.
I WANT TO TELL YOU WHY HUSBANDS STOP LOVING WIVES
Robert Kelly
* * *
I want to tell you why husbands stop loving wives there is a tearing always a tearing of our hearts into the geography of Projection and what is most close to us must always be found out there
and when the wife is a valve of the husband's heart and he can't really tell her cunt from the pie on the table and the sweet filmy curtains dancing in her windows and all is one lovely lovely landscape of intimate dailiness then Christ stands up in his heart and says Get out of her, lech lecha,
what is most intimate is already you and you must find her outside again for a man must leave wife and father and children to follow the Me that is himself through the fervid gethsemanis of adultery up the bleak hill of divorce.
And night after night the husband hears that in his head or his heart.
Let this cup pass, and let me drink always from the warm brown coffee mug she gave me,
let my hours count themselves her servant and let her stand at the door at nightfall reclaiming me back from the abstract day.
Let me love this woman for I love her as I love my life.
And the harsh Christ of the heart says That is why you must leave her. For every man who studies to save his life will lose it. And he is implacable. The husband in secret agonies of fantasy sees her betraying him, sees himself betraying her with all of her friends,
waitresses, stewardesses, actresses,
anyone at all. He speaks shyly or she speaks shyly of other loves and open marriages and all the bandaids that fall away night after night and the wound speaks in him again. He hurls himself on her desperate to ignite his own passion to love her once more as he did when she was other.
But his head is turned wrong way round.
He loves where they have been and where they are.
He does not love her future.
Long ago he stopped knowing his way into her dreams her secrets her subtle rhythms of self-disclosure.
They have feasts. They have friends.
They talk about children.
She knows it all. She has always known it and pieces her day together from the merest signs.
For Christ talks in her too,
a Christ who wants her for her own:
woman, you belong to no one;
I gave you sun to be continuous and night and rain and you need no more.
They all have voices, they all have arms. To belong to him is to belong to society,
to Caesar — is that what you want?
And sometimes it is what she wants:
that it all could be done once for all and life a gentle long echoing of her first shy assent. But the voice that hounds her says Look at him — he brings hardly the half of him to your bed.
He loves you too well, and you have become landscape: Even your storms are common in his well known sky,
like a thunderhead heavy, handsome over the brow of his own familiar hill.
You belong to your contract as he does. Nothing but what I do is done only once.
Everything else is again.
Die to each other and live.
CURSE FOUR: ORDERS FOR THE END OF TIME
Cynthia Huntington
"Whoever is alone will stay alone a long time."
— Rilke, "Autumn Day"
* * *
Time will stop here. A man with a suitcase going out and coming in. Opening a car door.
Whose wife and son cry at his goings and again at his return, whose lives have stopped,
waiting for him to choose.
The one who turns away now will keep walking.
A child lies down in his bed and then is a man.
Whoever cannot love today will never love,
will never make the choice a man makes,
will not build a house on a hill or a church in the woods.
Whoever is alone will stay alone a long time,
will walk through dark rooms of his house after midnight, listening for the sounds of cars and for the wind in the trees, and morning will not come.
DIVORCE DREAM
Mark Halliday
* * *
The marriage was in a last hour of honeycombed decay,
you could tell by the moaning sound of trolleys and the way memories had gone scaley-thin, one puff of wind would blow marriage fragments all over the city;
I climbed the dark stairs and sprawled on the sofa,
my wife was extremely not home. The clock was loud and busy and imperturbable in such dry air.
A phone call to my father seemed a good idea;
seemed necessary; it was the only idea.
I looked around for the phone. Things were different —
because of our being so wrong Annie and I let small things go awry: the tail of a dead mouse stuck out from behind a dresser and squirrels played polo inside the walls so the house trembled and my stomach too trembled like a dog in its sleep
and our black phone was gone. Then our landlords walked in,
our fat Irish landlords except now they were our tenants and their children were Chinese and they all spoke cheerfully about packages of dried noodles and puttered away in a cloud of happy family. I should call my father —
room to room I walked behind a ribbon of shadow emitted from a song called "I Don't Wanna Fade Away" ...
All the lightbulbs were fading; on the carpet were plops of Thanksgiving gravy; nothing mattered compared to what mattered. Annie knew this.
Finally in her room I found the phone but it was not black it was yellow, and it was so complicated, you had to plug it in three different ways and wind it up and little crucial knobs and hooks and rings kept falling loose in my hand.
INTIMACY
Kim Addonizio
* * *
The woman in the café making my cappuccino — dark eyes, dyed
red hair,
sleeveless black turtleneck — used to be lovers with the man I'm
seeing now.
She doesn't know me; we're strangers, but still I can't glance at her casually, as I used to, before I knew. She stands at the machine,
sinking the nozzle into a froth of milk, staring at nothing — I don't know what she's
thinking.
For all I know she might be remembering my lover, remembering
whatever happened between them — he's never told me, except to say that it wasn't
important, and then he changed the subject quickly, too quickly now that I think about
it; might he,
after all, have been lying, didn't an expression of pain cross his
face for just an instant? I can't be sure. And really it was nothing, I tell myself;
there's no reason for me to feel awkward standing here, or
complicitous,
as though there's something significant between us.
She could be thinking of anything; why, now, do I have the sudden
suspicion that she knows, that she feels me studying her, trying to imagine
them together? —
her lipstick's dark red, darker than her hair — trying to see him
kissing her, turning her over in bed the way he likes to have me. I wonder if maybe there were things about her he preferred, things he misses now
that we're together;
sometimes, when he and I are making love, there are moments I'm overwhelmed by sadness, and though I'm there with him I
can't help thinking of my ex-husband's hands, which I especially loved, and I want to
go back to that old intimacy, which often felt like the purest happiness I'd ever known, or would. But all that's over; and besides, weren't
there other lovers who left no trace? When I see them now, I can barely remember what they looked like undressed, or how it felt to have them inside me. So what is it I feel as she pours the black espresso into
the milk,
and pushes the cup toward me, and I give her the money,
and our eyes meet for just a second, and our fingers touch?
EX-WIFE: INFATUATION
Alan Shapiro
* * *
Your voice more bashful the more intimate it grew on that first night, an indrawn breath of speech I can't recall beyond the miserly sweet way it hesitated on the tongue, chary of giving,
chary of taking back,
the same breath doing both at once, it seemed,
to draw me to a closer kind of speech;
yet knowing too, knowing even then what I — more loved than loving — had the clumsy luxury not to know, that all too soon what words we had to say would fail us, each lingering syllable a syllable less between the pleasure it held off and invited,
and the bad luck pleasure would become;
a sweet syllable closer to the other nights,
the last nights, nights that would make remembering that long first night the bitter cost of having had what we were on the verge of having.
BOURNEHURST-ON-THE-CANAL
Gerald Costanzo
* * *
They arrive in the blustery summer twilight, couples in coupes,
roadsters and touring cars, up
from Falmouth and Hyannisport in Palm Beach suits and taffeta weave.
There is dancing to Paul Whiteman
and Alice Fay. What summons our attention — my mother-in-law told me this — is not the soft flags luffing
at each high corner of the pavilion,
nor the placards for photoplays screened
— during the week and after the season —
on the lower level. Not the darkened interior, the bandstand surrounded by potted ferns and huge portal
archways, those boxed lights with dim figures of dancing goddesses suspended from the iron
mesh ceiling. Never mind that all of this will burn to the cliffside in the autumn of 1933. Tonight it is
the one couple, vaguely familiar, lingering by the path. They are having a quarrel —
over sex or money, because what else
could it be? Never mind that within thirty years their eldest daughter will be a schoolmarm in another part
of the state; that their youngest,
surely the more beautiful and promising,
will have entered into an arrangement
with the Rathbone sisters which will be marked by sadness and disappointment. Never mind that their
only son, a graduate of Colby College,
will live in Cleveland and embark on a livelihood seldom
mentioned at family gatherings. Tonight they are young, and are having a quarrel. It is one of those evenings
full of such stirrings as only memory will adequately "take into account." Just now the orchestra strikes up and music
floats over the distance to where they are being a little brusque with each other,
a little stubborn.
And now, as if called, they begin to move toward the ballroom entrance, he slightly ahead and tugging at her wrist, though not quite
so much to cause pain.
He believes the moment has passed and he is leading her toward
an evening of happiness.
Toward a lifetime of happiness.
WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MAN
David Lehman
* * *
When she says margarita she means daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind as I stand disconsolate at the window."
He's supposed to know that.
When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking the leaves in Ithaca or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate at the window overlooking the bay where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.
When a woman loves a man it is one ten in the morning she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels drinking lemonade and two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bed where she remains asleep and very warm.
When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks.
When she says, "We're talking about me now,"
he stops talking. Her best friend comes over and says,
"Did somebody die?"
When a woman loves a man, they have gone to swim naked in the stream on a glorious July day with the sound of the waterfall like a chuckle of water rushing over smooth rocks,
and there is nothing alien in the universe.
Ripe apples fall about them.
What else can they do but eat?
When he says, "Ours is a transitional era,"
"that's very original of you," she replies,
dry as the martini he is sipping.
They fight all the time It's fun What do I owe you?
Let's start with an apology OK, I'm sorry, you dickhead.
A sign is held up saying "Laughter."
It's a silent picture.
"I've been fucked without a kiss," she says,
"and you can quote me on that,"
which sounds great in an English accent.
One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it
another nine times.
When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the
airport in a foreign country with a jeep.
When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that
she's two hours late and there's nothing in the refrigerator.
When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.
When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight to the moon, is sleep to the beloved.
A thousand fireflies wink at him.
The frogs sound like the string section of the orchestra warming up.
The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.
Excerpted from "It's Not You, It's Me"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Jerry Williams.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication,
Copyright,
Introduction,
I: One Foot Out the Door,
Privilege of Being,
Sweet Ruin,
Tell Me, Black Heart,
I Want to Tell you Why Husbands Stop Loving Wives,
Curse Four: Orders for the End of Time,
Divorce Dream,
Intimacy,
Ex-Wife: Infatuation,
Bournehurst-On-The-Canal,
When a Woman Loves a Man,
Intimations of Infidelity,
Cross-Country,
Walking Home Across the Island,
The Night Before Leaving,
Self-Improvement,
Deep River Motor Inn,
After Summer Fell Apart,
Home Together,
Ex-Wife: Homesickness,
Reunions with a Ghost,
Coda,
Terrible Love,
Giving Myself Up,
II: In the Middle of the Storm,
Listene,
Slowly,
Adam and Eve,
Finished,
Minneapolis,
The Story,
The Pure Loneliness,
Song of An X,
Their Divorce,
The Monarchs: 44,
The Sporting Life,
Dancer Holding Still,
Separated Father,
Fuck You Poem '45,
So Long Lonely Avenue,
Through the Glass,
5:14 From Chicago,
Breakdown,
You,
The End of the Affair,
Penis Envy,
After Mayakovsky,
Post-Thalamion,
Ghost,
Just That Empty,
Why I Will not Get out of Bed,
III: The Aftermath,
Ex-Boyfriends,
Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts,
Lover Release Agreement,
The Chair,
A Man Alone,
Dusk,
One Melody,
After,
What to Wear for Divorce,
Green Couch,
Beginning with His Body and Ending in a Small Town,
Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson,
Longing,
Divorce,
The Monarchs: 47,
Excavating the Ruins of Miami Beach,
Approach,
Heavy Trash,
Equitable Distribution,
A May-December Romance,
Straight Boyfriend,
Annulment,
The Gift,
All the Way from There to Here Jack Gilbert,
Lessening,
Spider Plant,
The Monarchs: 43,
Half-Life,
Charades,
More or Less a Sorrow Jane Miller,
Sway,
The Monarchs: 20,
Looking Down the Barrel,
Goodbye,
Blue Vase,
Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live,
At the End of the Affair,
Landscape with a Woman,
Permissions,
Acknowledgments,
About the Contributors,
From It's Not You, It's Me,