"The Right to Pleasure"

You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on whetstone:
that’s the way you’re taught to interpret these signs–
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a, and so if
when he couldn’t sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes--


Jessica Fisher, New Yorker, p 72, 1/8/2007



For Evangeline to lament. A letter?