Love and Work

I was sitting in my apt. in LA about 5 years ago on a very quiet night when my best friend, who'd been sitting at the dining room table reading and writing, suddenly stood up, New Yorker in hand, and walked across the room to me with a serious look on her face. "Read this." Well, this poem just kicked our ass. For writer chicks everywhere.

"Love and Work"

In an uncurtained room across the way
a woman in a tight dress paints her lips
a deeper red, and sizes up her hips
for signs of ounces gained since yesterday.

She has a thoughtful and clever face,
but she is also smart enough know
the truth; however large her brain may grow,
the lashes and earring must keep pace.

Although I've spread my books in front of me
with a majestic air of I'll show her,
I'm much less confident than I'd prefer
and now I've started pacing nervously.

I'm poring over theorems, tomes and tracts.
I'm getting ready for a heavy date
by staying up ridiculously late.
But a small voice advises, Face the facts:

Go on this way and you'll so come to harm.
The world's most famous scholars wander down
the most appalling alleyways in town,
a blond and busty airhead on each arm.

There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.

A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed...

What if I compromised? I'd stay up late
to hone my elocutionary skills,
and at the crack of dawn I'd swallow pills
to calm my temper and control my weight,

but I just can't. Romantics, so far gone
they think their lovers live for wisdom, woo
by growing wiser: when I think of you
I find the nearest lamp and turn it on.

Great gods of longing, watch me as I work,
and if I spout a martyr's smarmy grin
please find some violent way to do me in;
I'm not burning all these candles to shirk

a night of passion, but to give that night
a richly textured backdrop when it comes.
The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs
her discourse down has never seen the flight

of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage;
the fool whose love is truest is the one
who knows a lover's work is never done.
I'll call you when I've finished one more page.
                                                
                                   -- Rachel Wetzsteon