Want

By Joan Larkin b. 1939 Joan Larkin

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts

of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless

apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,

three cords of ash, an axe; I want

a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:

oats, coriander, thick green oil;

I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,

linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley

reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s

reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;

she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,

steam rising from rice. She wants goats,

chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want

wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.

She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.

I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s

tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.

I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.

She’s in her city, meeting

her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late

with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking

of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.

We’ve kissed all weekend; we want

to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Joan Larkin, "Want" from Cold River: Poems. Copyright © 1997 by Joan Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Joan Larkin.

Source: Cold River: Poems (Painted Leaf Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Joan Larkin earned a BA at Swarthmore, an MA in English at the University of Arizona, and an MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College.

Formally assured, frank, and often fearless, Larkin’s poems explore alcoholism, sexuality, and loss. In the Los Angeles Times, David Ulin observed that Larkin’s poems “stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and . . .

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