Poem in Praise of My Husband, By DIANE DI PRIMA

I suppose it hasn’t been easy living with me

either,

with my piques, and ups and downs, my need for

privacy

leo pride and weeping in bed when you’re

trying to sleep

and you, interrupting me in the middle of a

thousand poems

in the middle of our drive over the nebraska

hills and

into colorado, odetta singing, the whole world

singing in me

the triumph of our revolution in the air

me about to get that down, and you

you saying something about the carburetor

so that it all went away

but we cling to each other

as if each thought the other was the raft

and he adrift alone, as in this mud house

not big enough, the walls dusting down around us, a fine dust rain

counteracting the good, high air, and stuffing

our nostrils

we hang our pictures of the separate worlds:

new york college and san francisco posters

set out our japanese dishes, chinese knives

hammer small indian marriage cloths into

the adobe

we stumble thru silence into each other’s gut

blundering thru from one wrong place to the

next

like kids who snuck out to play on a boat

at night

and the boat slipped from its moorings, and

they look at the stars

about which they know nothing, to find out

where they are going

From “Out of This World,” edited and with an introduction by Anne Waldman (Crown: $22, paper; 690 pp.), an anthology of the Poetry Project at the St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, 1966-1991. 1976 by Diane di Prima. Reprinted by permission.