Sleeping Together

Jan 5 2015

Going to sleep with her.
The difference between
sleeping together
and going to bed.

The difference between
loving her
and making love.
To make, but hardly the same
as amassing money, or building stuff,

the force
of compulsion.

There is the hug
you give your maiden aunt --
pulling back, a motherly pat.
And then the embrace, the clutch,
the meld-into-one

all-encompassing hug;
like a seasoned sailor
returning to port
after years at war.

That famous kiss

in the city square
when Victory in Europe was finally declared

was apparently staged;
they weren't even a couple.
But we see what we expect
and wish for.

Just as we hear the words
but can never be sure
what was meant.

I had trouble explaining a relationship to someone. Sometimes, categories are difficult. Later that night, I was watching the cable series The Affair. As I remember it, Noah Solloway (played by Dominic West) was asked what he did when he got home that night. "Went to sleep with my wife", he said. The ambiguity struck me: did he go to sleep with her ...or sleep with her? Somehow, this simple answer conveys his growing ambivalence toward his marriage.

It seems my subconscious must have been chewing over these two things. Because that night, in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, this poem came to me, almost fully formed. This rarely happens. But when a fragment of a poem does come, I would normally feel compelled to write it down before it gets lost. This time, though, I felt serenely sure it would be there for me the next day; or would, if it was worth writing. And later that day, it did come back, pretty much as it was.

I like poems that explore the nuances of language and meaning: the subtlety of words; ludicrous euphemisms (as in "making love", which just diminishes the meaning of "love", and could better be said using that eminently serviceable 4-letter word). And language is certainly the basis of this one.

"See what we expect" very much calls back to The Affair. Because the first half of every episode is an event shaped by Noah's memory, and the second half the same event processed through Alison's. Neither is being self-serving, or manipulating the truth (so far, anyway -- I've just gotten started watching!) because both points of view are no less valid. In fact, the definite article should never be attached to "truth", since truth is never singular -- there are only "truths" -- and memory is never reliable. It's subjective and fraught and malleable, distorted by confirmation bias and expectation and selective vision, as well as the incorporation of new information each time a memory is recalled. Which is why the entire notion of eye-witness testimony -- especially in criminal law -- is utterly unreliable. As the poem says, we see what we're primed to expect and predisposed to want. And between speaker and listener, something is almost always lost.