Drift

By Brenda Shaughnessy b. 1970 Brenda Shaughnessy

I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me.

All the cities are like you anyway. Windows

darken when I get close enough to see.

Any place we want to stay’s polluted,

the good spots taken already by those

who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find.

We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights

so long they must be cut by the many pairs

of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns

and doesn’t share. I water god.

I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse.

I take what I want, and have ever since what

I want disappeared, like anything hunted.

That’s what you said. Disappointment

isn’t tender, dried and wide instead.

The tourists snapped you crying,

and the blanket I brought was so dirty

it must have been lying around

in lice and blood that whole year we fought.

It wasn’t clear, so I forgot.

I haven’t been sleeping, next to you

twitching to bury my boring eyes.

The ship made you sad, and the ferry, and canoe.

All boats do.

Reprinted from Human Dark with Sugar (2008) by Brenda Shaughnessy. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

Biography

Brenda Shaughnessy earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Our Andromeda (2012). Her work has appeared in the Yale Review, the Boston Review, McSweeney’s, and Best American Poetry, among other places. With C.J. Evans, . . .

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