War Movie: Last Leave, 1944, By PATRICIA STORACE

Then. No. Now.

A long silk scarf of a voice, pulled through

the loop of throat--

Jo Stafford singing on the radio.

He wants so much to hear a voice like that, and it exists,

as simply as creation, the way the world provides

an image for the feeling

that’s richer than the feeling, so that

part of the satisfaction

is possession, part the perfection of the longing.

The way you know through flowers what

perfect human flesh is,

the way the wife perfects the dim maternity she somehow

flowered from,

and you derive the gold circles on your hands

from the sun’s blinding ultimate wedding band.

There’s a hotel room with a key that fits the door,

and inside, drinking coffee, arguing

or sleeping, the two of them keep marrying.

The arch of every nine-to-five is Notre Dame

where, strangely, you don’t need ever to have been.

On Lexington, walking with his arm around her,

he sees a man lunching on a roll and a cold beer,

and he’s so goddamned grateful that he has to swear.

Love is good work, but they stagger sometimes

like a pair of stevedores beneath all the thinking

that it takes to feel, and strange to know precisely

how young on Bleecker and who you are

at three-fifteen is:

bronze and sculpture.

And they’ve got tickets for the Lombard picture.

The quivering caged canaries of the houselights dim;

the audience, cashmered in theme and shadow, dreams

the accumulating story as it snows on them.

The pilot is at peace, living in the film,

but his young wife only watches him, an afterlife

of movie changing his right cheek. She’s swept under fire,

sensing all alone the dark is inexhaustible.

She’s in love and terror; and it’s hers now,

the world’s parure, the legendary suite of matched

black jewels.

And she watches the angle of her husband’s head

cresting from his shoulders, and she swears

that if it’s asked of her, she’ll care

for his death as tenderly as any child

his body gives to her.

The screen swastika flickers in his wire rims.

She strokes his hair, he turns; she takes the cross

from him.

Their young night comes toward them outside

like a daughter,

wearing city lights like white gardenias in her hair.

Effortlessly, unlike Christ’s disciples, they stay awake

with her, the fifth of their five nights, the brunette girl

that history--older, experienced, irresistible--

is about to take.

From “The Best American Poetry, 1991,” edited by Mark Strand (Scribner’s: $27.95.) . Storace was born in Chicago and grew up in Mobile, Ala. Her book of poems, “Heredity,” won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize . 1991 by Patricia Storace. Reprinted with permission.