Something Sensible About Desire

ISSUE: Autumn 1990

If we agree that the truth is never
only what we want to believe,
the urgent arguments of desire

still have the body’s weight behind them,
the weight of the bully who tells you
what to say and then makes sure you mean it.

So you are on your knees in the dirt
and listening hard—Say it!
Say it again.

Late at night, after dinner, and another
bottle of wine, all sides of the matter
blur into significance, and the opposite

of what you meant is what you meant.
”But that’s what I was saying,”
everyone is saying,

and no one wants to go to bed.
Too late now for the singular, the personal
example; but I know what I wanted to believe,

what you were saying—something sensible
about desire, and how we hurt people,
and care about that, and do it anyway,

and some of us choose what we feel
we can’t afford to turn away from,
and therefore think about death,

which is the last argument:
how it stands beyond
all that is merely true, how it only listens.

Lawrence Raab

Lawrence Raab is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Probable World (Penguin, 2000), What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003). He has also published a chapbook of collaborative poems with Stephen Dunn, Winter at the Caspian Sea (Palanquin Press, 1999). His poems have appeared in several editions of The Best American Poetry, in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things, and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.