Assignment: Read "The Thief" By Dorianne Laux. Notice how the poem's energy comes from the woman's awareness of that she is distracting the man from his hopes. Remember a time when you or someone you know did something that they had reservations about. Write the memory out with all the details from the moment and then revise for sound.
| The Thief
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| What is it when your man sits on the floor in sweatpants, his latest project set out in front of him like a small world, maps and photographs, diagrams and plans, everything he hopes to build, invent or create, and you believe in him as you always have, even after you set your coffee down and move toward him, to where he sits oblivious of you, concentrating in a square of sun -- you step over the rulers and blue graph-paper to squat behind him, and he barely notices, though you're still in your robe which falls open a little as you reach around his chest, feel for the pink wheel of each nipple, the slow beat of his heart, your ear pressed to his back to listen -- and you are torn, not wanting to interrupt his work but unable to keep your fingers from dipping into the ditch in his pants, torn again with tenderness to the way his flesh grows unwillingly toward your curved palm, toward the light, as if you planted it, this sweet root, your mouth already an echo of is shape -- you slip your tongue in his ear and he hears you call him away from his work, the angled lines of his thoughts, into the shapeless place you are bound to take him, over the bridges of bone, beyond borders of skin, climbing over him into the world of the body, its labyrinth of ladders and stairs -- and you love him, with equal measures of expectancy and fear and awe, taking him with you into the soft geometry of the flesh, the earth before its sidewalks and cities, its glistening spires, stealing him back from the world he loves into this other world he cannot build without you. |