Happy Hour

By Alan Shapiro b. 1952 Alan Shapiro

The gregarious dark is shifting

when she puts her second drink,

the free one, half on the coaster.

The tipped wine poised at the brim

is the beginning of the bad girl

she’ll promise never to be again

tomorrow, who can taunt him now

to prove he doesn’t love her

and never could: her hand slides

up his thigh until he tenses—

‘My little prig, don’t you want

to fuck me?’ the bad girl

she couldn’t be at home, his wife on ice.

All he can do is smile back

as though she’s made a harmless

good-natured joke, and struggle

not to look around to see

who’s heard, who’s watching. He wants

to smash the wine glass in her face

so he can know for once

exactly what he’s done wrong;

but he places it instead

back safely on the coaster

quickly before she sees.

Never cautious enough, he is prepared

even if she knocks it over

to go down on his hands and knees

and wipe it up, kind and forgiving.

In all ways careful to acquit himself

so that tomorrow when she says

she doesn’t deserve him, he’s too good,

he can believe her. Tomorrow

will be his happy hour. There won’t be

anything she wouldn’t do for him.

Alan Shapiro, “Happy Hour” from Happy Hour (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by Alan Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Selected Poems 1974-1996 (The University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Alan Shapiro was educated at Brandeis University. As the author of numerous collections of poetry, Shapiro has explored family, loss, domesticity, and the daily aspects of people’s lives in free verse and traditional poetic forms.

Poet-critic J.D. McClatchy observed in a review of Shapiro’s Dead, Alive and Busy (2000), “Mr. Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his . . .

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