This One’s for You

By Jan Heller Levi b. 1954

Even if you didn’t have green eyes (in the bathtub, blue).

Even if you didn’t have a lovely singing voice,

or care for Alexandrine champagne

some slow Saturday evenings to sing it through,

it pleases me, your lips close to my ear,

or when you’re a big girl, and I’m a big girl too.

Five years difference between we two.

Sometimes it hardly matters. I’ve decided to worship you,

Diana, goddess of the forest—

or is she the one of the hunt?

Who cares? You remind me of her

too. Some woman caught me up, breathless, in her strong arms,

said breathe, darling. Her eyes were green-blue.

Vague resemblances: that’s the daily news.

Meaning: I’m willingly a fool for you

any hour past midnight,

and almost anytime in three-quarter view.

Consider this, too: stumbling back, after a fight,

to someplace we could call home, you and I have been known

to duet a jubilee so funky it sounds like the blues.

What steady arrows you shoot, Diana, become

a goddess of the hearth: you whisper

time to put the porchlight on,

and we do. Who am I talking to?

What is this strange glare, this prescience that you won’t be true?

Sometimes you say something like even so, boo,

and it sounds like breathe, darling. That’s why this one’s for you.

Source: Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (Louisiana State University Press, 1999)

Biography

Poet Jan Heller Levi was born in New York City and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the poetry collections Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (1999), which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Skyspeak: Poems (2005). Conversational and intimate, Levi’s poems often address familial concerns and aspects of a woman’s life. Alice Fulton . . .

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