The Safecracker

By Linda Pastan b. 1932 Linda Pastan

On nights when the moon seems impenetrable—

a locked porthole to space;

when the householder bars his windows

and doors, and his dog lies until dawn,

one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps

with her rosy knees sealed tightly together,

on such nights the safecracker sets to work.

Axe . . . Chisel . . . Nitroglycerin . . .

Within the vault lie forty thousand

tons of gold; the heaped up spoils

of Ali Baba's cave; the secrets of the molecule.

He sands his fingertips

to feel the subtle vibrations

of wheel lining up, just so, with wheel.

His toolmarks are his fingerprints.

And now a crack appears on the side

of the egg, a single fault line,

and within: the golden yolk just waiting.

A kind of wind . . . a door flies open . . . a glitter

of forsythia forced out of the branch.

With smoothest fingertips you touch

the locked cage of my ribs . . . just so.

My knees fall open. And Cleopatra smiles,

whose own Egyptians first invented the lock.

Linda Pastan, “The Safecracker” from The Imperfect Paradise. Copyright © 1988 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted with the permission of the Jean V. Naggar Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author.

Source: Carnival Night: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)

Biography

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to . . .

Continue reading this biography