EMILY DICKINSON HAD THE WORST TASTE IN MEN
by Katha Pollitt
Page 12
Let's see, I've run out of time, so I'll read one more poem. This is a poem called "Atlantis." You all know that myth, I won't go through it.
Dreaming of our golden boulevards and temples,
our painted palaces set in torch-lit gardens,
our spires and minarets, our emerald harbor,
you won't want to hear about the city we knew,
the narrow neighborhoods of low white houses,
where workmen come home for lunch and an afternoon nap,
old women in sweat-stained, penitental black
ease thier backaches gratefully against doorways,
and the widow who keeps the corner grocery
anxiously watches her child dragging his toy,
who was sickly from birth, and everyone knows
must die soon.
You won't want to know how we lived,
the hot sun, the horse-traders
cheating each other out of boredom,
in the brothel, the prostitutes curling each others hair,
while the madam limps upstairs to feed the canary,
or the young louts, smoking in bare cafes
where old men play dominoes for glasses of cognac.
And how can we blame you?
We, too, were in love with something we never could name.
We never could let ourselves say
that the way the harbor flashed like bronze at sunset,
or the hill towns swam in the twilight like green stars,
were only tricks of the light and meant nothing.
We, too, believed that a moment would surely come
when our lives would stand hard and pure,
like marble statues.
And because we were, after all, only a poor city,
a city like others,
of sailors' bars and sunflowers,
we gave ourselves up to be only a name,
an image of temples and spires and jeweled gardens,
for which reason, we are envied of all peoples,
and even now could not say,
what life would have to be
for us to have chosen it.
