After You ...
July 10 2016


After you,
snatching the door, catching her eye
flashing a smile. 

And after you,
a grateful man, a step behind
tagging along in your wake.

And after you,
the women who came
to stand, for a time, in your place. 
That quick succession
of expectance
lust 
pretenders.

Who were never as glamorous
or mischievous
with your back of carbon steel.
As breakable, or pervious,
maddening
or real.

They say when a door slams shut
a window opens.
But in a barren age
when chivalry is scorned
and conquest frowned upon
we squeeze through all at once;
all elbow jabs, and shoulder shoves
and shards of broken glass.



The expression after you you caught my eye in something or other I was reading. I naturally pictured a held door, a politely inviting nod. And then the playfulness of language struck me, setting the cliche against its literal meaning. So I let my stream of consciousness take me on this shallow dive into the murky waters of male/female relationship, courtship, expectation. It doesn’t specifically come from personal experience. But most of us have someone in our past we regret losing, or we idealize, or whom absence heightens.  

There is more resorting to cliche in the door closing, the window opening. But again, it’s slightly reframed through a literal lens. And, as I often enjoy doing do with cliche, it’s used ironically:  a kind of amused invocation of those earnestly inspirational self-help bromides.

I like the contradictions contained in her description. Because we are all that complicated and contradictory:  an amalgam of strength and weakness, frustration and ease. Even though memory and distance conspire to reduce us to a single dimension.

Stylistically, I was very pleased with the the recursive short “a” sound that cinches the poem tight.  It begins with the first after, and ends with the final glass. This kind of word-play can be very self-indulgent, and risks getting in the way of the poem if it sounds forced, or shoe-horned in, or like showing-off. What makes it gratifying is when the perfect word works:  that is, when even without this constraint of rhyme and rhythm, that word is the most natural choice; when it doesn’t jump out or interrupt the poem’s easy flow.