In the Dark In the dark, they are indistinguishable, So, in the dark, they are all her. On a good night, when she makes it To a street light or a bus stop, He can make out the flash of red hair. She wears it differently now. She wears it differently every time. It says, I’m not yours anymore, What I was for you I will never be again. And it gets tiresome, her constant Walking away, false busyness, And he’s tired of playing cat and mouse, Hard-to-get, chase me, chase me, Close enough to hear the thump-thump rhythm Of her shoes, and then To feel her soft and pliant hair.
My notes: back at the summer Peninsula Writers conference at Glen Lake, we had a presenter who, if I remember correctly (it was so long ago now!) posited that a writer couldn’t (or couldn’t successfully, maybe) write about a character that they didn’t have any sympathy for. So I wrote this poem as a sort of exercise in that direction – as a poem where I don’t sympathize with the person whose eyes we are looking through. It’s very interesting to try to put yourself in that position, to understand without sympathizing? I don’t know how well it worked, but this was the result.
