Summer near the River

By Carolyn Kizer b. 1925 Carolyn Kizer

themes from the Tzu Yeh and the Book of Songs

I have carried my pillow to the windowsill

And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it,

But no breeze stirs the tepid morning.

Only I stir ... Come, tease me a little!

With such cold passion, so little teasing play,

How long can we endure our life together?

No use. I put on your long dressing-gown;

The untied sash trails over the dusty floor.

I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror

And pluck my eyebrows.

I don’t care if the robe slides open

Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh.

I can accuse that nonexistent breeze ...

I am as monogamous as the North Star,

But I don’t want you to know it. You’d only take advantage.

While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.

All right, sleep! The cat means more to you than I.

I can rouse you, but then you swagger out.

I glimpse you from the window, striding toward the river.

When you return, reeking of fish and beer,

There is salt dew in your hair. Where have you been?

Your clothes weren’t that wrinkled hours ago, when you left.

You couldn’t have loved someone else, after loving me!

I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window.

Later, when you hold me in your arms

It seems, for a moment, the river ceases flowing.

Carolyn Kizer, “Summer Near the River” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Cool Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

Biography

Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But . . .

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