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Probation

By Averill Curdy Averill Curdy

The cheap dropped ceiling

jumped like a pot-lid boiling

when our upstairs neighbor

chased his girl that winter.

Falling out of

summer’s skimpy tops

she’d want our phone. Her plush lips

creased. Not exactly blonde,

but luteous, we thought,

pleased the right word

was there for that shade

of slightly slutty mermaid.

Wincing, we’d hear him punch

along the floor on crutch-

es, a giant

bat trying to mince

a mayfly. Sex and Violence

you called them; Blondie with

Dagwood on crystal meth,

I’d tell our friends

over dinners stewed

in noise. Even his truck cowed.

Black, smoked glass, outsized wheels

flaunted like chrome knuckles

we shrank from, ducked,

afraid we’d find her

later, knocking at our door.

Some nights we waited through

like captured prey. To you

I’d turn in bed,

saying the furtive

words against your back, I love

... You’d stroke my hair, or hip,

all our years the same flip

crack, I do, too.

Averill Curdy, “Probation,” from Poetry (April 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Averill Curdy.

Source: Poetry (April 2005).

Biography

A lyric poet influenced by Donne, Hopkins, Merrill, and Auden, Averill Curdy notes, “In my own work, the aural quality and weight of words is very important and I think it’s partly an attempt to make them feel as material as the smears of color on a painter’s palette.” Her meditative, dense lines are smoothed by time; as Curdy explains, “I write slowly—always, it seems, at the very limit of what I know.”

Curdy began to write . . .

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