Reunion

By Carolyn Forché b. 1950 Carolyn Forche

Just as he changes himself, in the end eternity changes him.
—Mallarmé

On the phonograph, the voice

of a woman already dead for three

decades, singing of a man

who could make her do anything.

On the table, two fragile

glasses of black wine,

a bottle wrapped in its towel.

It is that room, the one

we took in every city, it is

as I remember: the bed, a block

of moonlight and pillows.

My fingernails, pecks of light

on your thighs.

The stink of the fire escape.

The wet butts of cigarettes

you crushed one after another.

How I watched the morning come

as you slept, more my son

than a man ten years older.

How my breasts feel, years

later, the tongues swishing

in my dress, some yours, some

left by other men.

Since then, I have always

wakened first, I have learned

to leave a bed without being

seen and have stood

at the washbasins, wiping oil

and salt from my skin,

staring at the cupped water

in my two hands.

I have kept everything

you whispered to me then.

I can remember it now as I see you

again, how much tenderness we could

wedge between a stairwell

and a police lock, or as it was,

as it still is, in the voice

of a woman singing of a man

who could make her do anything.

Carolyn Forché, “Reunion” from The Country Between Us. Copyright © 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Country Between Us (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1982)

Biography

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. An articulate . . .

Continue reading this biography