Prothalamion

By Michael Ryan b. 1946 Michael Ryan

The love we’ve defined for ourselves

in privacy, in suffering,

keeps both of us lonely as a fist,

but does intimacy mean a happy ending?

I’m afraid of marriage.

Driving past them at night, the shadows

on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:

a father stuck in a job, his daughter

opening her blouse to strangers.

And your hands, for example,

like a warm liquid on my face

don’t evaporate as you take them away.

Nor are our betrayals silent,

although we listen only in passing.

We’re learning how to walk unlit streets,

to see threats instead of trees,

the right answer to a teenager

opening his knife. The answer is yes.

Always we couldn’t do otherwise.

Source: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)

Biography

Poet and memoirist Michael Ryan was born in St Louis, Missouri. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and Claremont Graduate School, and earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Iowa. Ryan’s first volume, Threats Instead of Trees (1974), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His second collection, In Winter (1981), was selected by Louise Glück for the National Poetry Series. God Hunger (1989) won the Lenore . . .

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