April 2018
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
After retiring from 22 years at Ripon College, I have moved to the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels. While I miss my students, colleagues, prairie walks, and skies filled with sandhill cranes, I am nourished by the beauty of the mountains every time I walk up the road or take a drive. Co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), my most recent publications include Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo), SoFloPoJo, One, and Crab Orchard Review.​

Ode To My “Monogamous” Voice
 
            --with apologies to Emily, Walt, Robert, William, James, Gwendolyn, Wallace,  
               Sharon, Sylvia, Jean, Harold, and the student whose typo inspired this poem.
  
Darling, please know when I stray to Emily, say,
in search of such substantive economy we might
 
subsist on bread rising to a certain slant of light 
through sherry snifters in the privacy of eternity, 
 
or perchance to Walt whose largesse is so all 
city-and-country encompassing we might leave 
 
our perfumed urban rooms behind to dine outdoors 
with the multitudes of meat-eaters and whiskey sluggers 
 
unable to contain ourselves as we digress on the grass 
for centuries, I do it for you, that on my own divergent
 
path my heart remains true to its yellow wooded core,
wedded to my one and only monogamous voice, you,
 
ready to make peace in our small clay cabin by the shore
as we kick up flusters of leaves. Please forgive those times
 
lying in a hammock wasting away, the wind’s incessant
critique: mundane, redundant, endless, flat, monotonous.
 
Remember our very first breath, how we cried
magic air into our lungs and nurtured each line
 
with gobbling mother-eye as far as we could
bend it to make a difference? Let’s renew our
 
vows where way gives on to way. Call it traveler’s
remorse as temptation looms in every direction from
 
the man with the blue guitar to the old woman whose 
sex opens its gold cell to the world, even orgies of
 
spoken-word slammers when possibilities burst our
bookshelves. And come April I can be cruel, locking
 
the door to wander lilac trails with former flames
or the latest laureate each day until you feel you do
 
not do any more, claustrophobic as a black shoe
in which I have lived like a foot in the attic with
 
my zombie friends, daring to swim the wide
Sargasso Sea. But dearest, please know in my
 
playing the field, under the influence of revisionist
anxiety by all that blooms before me, I remain loyal
 
to my original promise to make you sing in sickness
and in health, celebrate until death do us part every
 
atom belonging to me that belongs to you, good-
and bad-ass tops of our heads taking off together. 
 ​​© 2018 Kate Sontag
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