The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poem Thread, 9/19/07 Bonus

"The Same Wall"

My living room's scarred red rose pattern
made me think of nineteenth century dances,
when there was a room for dancing and nothing else,
and a word for the woman who never got
the invitation. Not that dancing was beyond her,
the wallflower, but she hung back against
the damask of trellised roses to watch
the whirling of the partnered ones. Was she
poor? Not pretty enough? She was not to ask
but only answer, prop her body against the wallpaper
until claimed, or not. The stags, fattening
on punch and cigars, leaned against their
opposing wall and laughed so loudly her spine
and shoulder blades pushed harder against
the florid plaster, Oh, let me in.
In those men too the fear of the dance with nothing
to hold them up but a woman's hands.
The wallflower's hands held each other
as she hung, itinerant portrait in bad light,
for the inspection of men who neither cared
nor knew how to look at every mortal stroke
of her. She was let in to the actual flowering
earth alongside the men with their smell
of hair oil and smoke, their gold watch-chains,
their laughter like bugles. The rose pattern
that helped paralyze her is gone. I stripped
my walls, painted them white and once a year
hosted the dances my generation grew up with:
a lot of floor pounding, not much touching,
dances that could be done in a circle or a line
or alone, no one having to ask or answer,
dances once meant to dissolve our differences
into one huge world-changing music, and still
—as I flung out one arm, or whipped my head around
inside a guitar crescendo—I'd see someone
leaning against the same wall, as though waiting
for its blank expanse to open and seal her off
from our random, pounding motions.
Whether the wall is flowered or not, I see
a woman stand against it not dancing.

—Robert Hill Long

I love the thinking and the story in this one.

as if there is a ghost in the house....

i love it.