Something to remind all who are parents of what it was like to be a teen if any of you have forgotten.
I had to wake Sam to read it out loud to him. I don’t think he was as into it as I was, so I have to share it with you.
Desire
–Gail Mazur
From Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems
It was a kind of torture–waiting
to be kissed. A dark car parked away
from the street lamp, away from our house
where my tall father would wait, his face
visible at a pane high in the front door.
Was my mother always asleep? A boy
reached for me, I leaned eagerly into him,
soon the windshield was steaming.
Midnight. A neighbor’s bedroom light
goes on, then off. The street is quiet…
Until I married, I didn’t have my own key,
that wasn’t how it worked, not at our house.
You had to wake someone with the bell,
or he was there, waiting. Someone let you in.
Those pleasures on the front seat of a boy’s
father’s car were “guilty,” yet my body knew
they were the only right thing to do,
my body hated the cage it had become.
One of those boys died in a car crash;
one is a mechanic; one’s a musician.
They were young and soft, and, mostly, dumb.
I loved their lips, their eyebrows, the bones
of their cheeks, cheeks that scraped mine raw,
so I’d turn away from the parent who let me
angrily in. And always, the next day,
no one at home could penetrate the fog
around me. I’d relive the precious night
as if it were a bridge to my new state
from the old world I’d been imprisoned by,
and I’ve been allowed to walk on it, to cross
a border–there’s an invisible line
in the middle of the bridge, in the fog,
where I’m released, where I think I’m free.
