Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

-Margaret Atwood

For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission --

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound --
for the burying of her small red wound alive --

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call --

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.


-Anne Sexton

lilith

The other woman
She is a narcissistic sex worker with no knowledge of true love.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jonathon Keats

Nov. 17, 1999 | In the beginning, there was Lilith. She was Adam's mistress. By current standards, it wasn't much of an affair: no sex, no paparazzi. Just a single line in Genesis that, before any notice is given to Adam's anatomy -- his rib cage or his genitalia -- has female created together with male.

To explain the other woman, the one who preceded Eve, legend holds that Lilith fought with Adam for dominance. It's an open question as to who lost, since Lilith fled to the sea, only to return as the serpent who tempted Eve -- leading to the expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden, to mortality and, of course, to sex.

Whither marriage? For a week, Mothers Who Think examines the battered but unbowed institution No regrets I was an unashamed mistress. Wisdom ancient and new That was Then: Keep it clean This is Now: Ask the madame: Two days of foreplay does the trick - - - - - - - The winners of "Is this marriage doomed?" First place Second place Third place

Lilith may be the closest thing the modern mistress has to a patron saint. If Eve is the perfect companion, Lilith is the perfect seductress. In her presence the whole of paradise isn't worth the price of an apple. She's independent, mysterious, every wife's worst nightmare. Tradition maintains that Lilith gives men wet dreams. She has all the talent, all the skill a mistress needs to succeed at her art, which is just a polite way of saying that Lilith is the first narcissist.

She certainly isn't the the last one. Through the ages, mistresses have practiced their narcissism, sometimes exquisitely tortured, other times smashingly tragic, to rapt audiences and rave reviews. They've called it "romance." They've called it "love." And some -- including Victoria Griffin in "The Mistress: Histories, Myths and Interpretations of the 'Other Woman'" -- have even enlisted Lilith herself to make their case.

After all, she's the one whose temptations lead to man's sexual awakening, the woman who, while Eve is busy making babies, taunts Adam by hovering forever at the vanishing point of erotic promise.

How pathetic, then, that the mistress -- smitten by self-love -- never recognizes that she's as incidental as a midwife. True, by drawing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Lilith makes possible their sexual union. But that union is with each other, not with her.

The biblical term "to know" is more than a prudish euphemism. Adam knows Eve in every sense -- from bunny-fucking familiarity to lovey-dovey intimacy -- and all Lilith can hope for is to serve as a cheap bit of porn thrown into connubial foreplay. Lilith can only help Adam know Eve better: If Eve is Adam's wife, Lilith is their marital aid.

So why is the woman depicted by history, literature and art as a virtuoso of deception so deceived by her own striptease as to believe that she loves the man she services -- and that he loves her? That is the question that Griffin has put it upon herself to answer.

"My basic position," claims the author, "is that I stand alone and find security only in myself. This is actually true for everyone, but it is not generally recognized; the popular conception of marriage deliberately blinds people to it, with the erroneous idea that security can be found in another person and be guaranteed by legal and/or sacred contract."

It's hardly surprising that the mistress sets herself against the wife; the mistress needs the wife to legitimize her role, to provide the groundwork on which she can pitch her tent as "the other." What's interesting is why the mistress needs that groundwork at all, why she so desperately wants to camp out.

The reason is that the mistress sets possession in opposition to love. Taken seriously, marriage entails monogamy: The married woman agrees to be the possession of her husband, and the married man agrees to be the possession of his wife. They are shared property; only the mistress, living outside the marital bond, operates under no obligations whatsoever. Alas, what she never sees is that wedlock demands of love more than the periodic four-star triple-X orgasm.

To reduce love to sexual intercourse is to lose all context, to mistake laying bricks for making a home. Bricks are cheap because they're interchangeable, whereas a home, made unique by the dirty, gritty effort of living in it, is priceless: To lose a home is emotionally devastating not because it entails losing a bunch of building supplies, but because it involves cutting short a narrative.

The monogamous love of marriage demands emotional engagement in the absolute. That lifelong commitment, and all the dents and scratches it acquires through the work of carrying it out for richer and poorer, through sickness and health, gives anything that happens in marriage an emotional depth of a magnitude unimaginable in a casual context. In a society otherwise devoid of permanence, a world otherwise lacking any sense of purpose whatsoever, married fighting is the most painful, married sex the most pleasurable, married love the most meaningful.

the other woman

She's the nicest woman you could ever meet; in fact, you might have met her. You might know her fairly well and you might like her a lot without being aware that she's sleeping with your husband. She is a nice woman, really. This is the only part of her life that can't be admired, that can't be examined, that can't be discussed out loud. It's the only part of her life for which she doesn't respect herself and it keeps her miserable, even when she's happy, because she knows whatever happiness she has is stolen and illegitimate. She's not a fool even though she knows she's acting like one.

Or, she's not sleeping with your husband -- maybe you're single, maybe you have different relationships in your life -- and so this is a friend of yours, a woman you've come to consider a good and dependable part of your life. She's an elementary school teacher, a physical therapist, a pharmacist, a social worker, a bank executive, a swim coach, an engineer, a computer programmer. She's been your friend since junior high, your college roommate, your best colleague, your neighbor, your confidante, without revealing this part of her life to you because she suspects that even at your most understanding you wouldn't understand. You couldn't unless you've been through this and she knows you haven't. Or she thinks she knows you haven't but one thing she has learned is that nobody is exempt from the possibility of this happening -- if a person could claim exemption, she'd be first on the list.

So she doesn't tell you, her best friend. You might judge her harshly or, even worse, stop speaking to her altogether and she can't bear the thought of losing you. She's already surrounded by the possibility of loss and will not add to it, even at the cost of not talking about the very thing that consumes her waking moments.

Educated, polite and brought up by a loving family, she's not a particularly hot tomato or the kind of woman usually transported across state lines for immoral purposes. Attractive, fun, attentive and considerate, she is deeply committed to those she loves and that's one of the reasons this tears her apart, One of the things she loves about this man, after all, is the way he treats the ones to whom he is closest.

Not her -- he can't treat her as if she were really in his life, after all -- but others. His real family, the inhabitants of his real life. If he were an emotional bully or an emotional slob, she wouldn't have been drawn to him in the first place. Those aspects of his life he betrays to be with her are the very parts of him she would never wish him to compromise. So she understands how divided he is, how he feels like a piece of meat being sliced up by a rusty knife, how he feels like he's drowning and suffocating and being eaten alive all at once. He, too, is a decent person, except for this business of loving someone he isn't supposed to love.

Holidays are hard, but so is spring and so are winter nights, summer mornings and long, early-autumn afternoons. The phone is her lifeline and she has about 17 different ways of being reached in case some shard of time can be broken off and given to her. She'll take what she can get -- not in a way anyone would think of her, but in this case it's true. There are codes they use to communicate what can't be spoken or written; these were funny at first but over time they have be come as serious as a car crash.

Maybe it ends when there is a car crash and they're in the front seat together, returning from a place where they never should have been, suddenly having to make up a series of lies to disguise what everybody around them now suspects is the truth. Even if they get away with it, the experience wrecks them, mangles what they had beyond recognition. Or, she goes to his kid's high school graduation ceremony and realizes that it's been 12 years already and that she could have had a kid herself by now, one in the sixth grade.

Or it continues. Impossible nights, intolerable weekends, endless violations of everything she knows about how life should be lived, but they have loved each other for so long now, how can it stop? She starts to worry that he'll die of a heart attack and no one will tell her for days because why would anyone think to call and tell her an incidental piece of bad news about some guy she never knew very well? Or she starts to think about her own final moments. This is the worst.

She can't believe this is her life. Nobody else would believe it either, even the man. It's a tough, rotten, exhausting routine. Nobody chooses it on purpose. This is not a defense of her: She knows better than you that what she's doing is indefensible. Don't ridicule her, and don't think you don't know her. You do.

jezebel

who's seen jezebel?
she was born to be the woman i would know
and hold like the breeze
half as tight as both our eyes closed

who's seen jezebel?
she went walking where the cedars line the road
her blouse on the ground
where the dogs were hungry, roaming

saying, "wait, we swear
we'll love you more and wholly
jezebel, it's we, we that you are for
only"

who's seen jezebel?
she was born to be the woman we could blame
make me a beast half as brave
i'd be the same

who's seen jezebel?
she was gone before i ever got to say
"lay here my love
you're the only shape i'll pray to, jezebel"

who's seen jezebel?
will the mountain last as long as i can wait
wait like the dawn
how it aches to meet the day

who's seen jezebel?
she was certainly the spark for all i've done
the window was wide
she could see the dogs come running

saying, "wait, we swear
we'll love you more and wholly
jezebel, it's we, we that you are for
only"

evening on the ground (lilith's song)

evening, evening on the ground
and there is no one else around
so you will blame me
blame me for the rocks
and baby bones and broken lock
on the garden
garden wall of eden
for the spider bites
and all your love as we were
we were born to fuck each other
one way or another
but i'll only lie
down by the waterside at night

hey man, tiny baby tears
i will collect a million years
and you can blame me
blame me, i will wear it
in the empty, hollow part of my garden
garden wall of eden
and the clamor as they raise the curtain
you will, you will never make me learn
to lay beneath the mountain
cause i'll only lie
down by the waterside at night