Molly Peacock Verse-Virtual 2016 July

July 2016

Here’s a summer poem that I wrote on a kind of self-assignment. I was trying to get one image to explore throughout the poem, a defining “conceit”, like John Donne’s famous compass conceit in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” That sounds a bit grand for a small poem like this, I know. I kept searching, not in a pressured way, but in a curious, wondering-wandering way, for an image wide and deep enough to embrace the feeling of recognition you can experience when you observe someone you know intimately in a public situation, the kind of observation that leads to a whole new understanding of the relationship. Suddenly I felt this refreshing coldness. I had found the stream-fed pond. Our twenty-fourth anniversary is coming up in August.

Molly Peacock and Michael Groden reading in bed
photo by Andrew Tolson

Marriage

I watch my husband at a party,
a shy boy become a man at ease at last.
Success freshens his face, the boy now free
to pass beneath his expressions
as if slipping under a fence.
I used to slip under a fence
to swim in a stream-fed pond
and laze in the water till shocked
and delighted by a cold spot I swam through.
That’s what his face is like,
infused by a source inside him.
I know I have a part in it,
just as I was part of the pond
where I loved to swim.