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Acclaimed poet Molly Peacock tracks the vicissitudes of midlife marriage in her saucy, vulnerable, philosophical sixth collection.

Demonstrating once again her "luxuriantly sensual imagination" (Washington Post), Molly Peacock celebrates marriage and a two-track life with the man who became her husband. As teenage sweethearts separated by other obligations, they found each other again at midlife. The piquant, sonnet-based poems take as their starting point her husband’s survival from a life-threatening disease, addressing the contradictory ideas of planning for the future along with the urgency to make the present brilliantly alive. Three sections of the book portray moments in the marriage — domestic glimpses — but all the poems revolve around the deeper issue of how we love and how love affects the way we live.

from "The Rescuer"

Certain people take huge pride in keeping
others alive, and I was one of these.
Rescuing, to me, meant suddenly leaping
out of my mind and landing on those
whom I thought I should help like a panther
—a sleek shadow-thing with a rippling hide
and a growl covered by a purr.

POETRY> The Second Blush | Cornucopia | Earlier Books of Poetry

Excerpts from The Second Blush

      Of Night

A city mouse darts from the paws of night.
A body drops from the jaws of night.
A woman denies the laws of night,
awake and trapped in the was of night.
A young man turns in the gauze of night,
unraveling the cause of night:
that days extend their claws at night
to re-enact old wars at night,
though dreams can heal old sores at night
and Spring begins its thaw at night,
while worry bones are gnawed at night.
He sips her through a straw at night.
Verbs whisper in the clause of night.
A finger to her lips
                              the pause of night.

       The Cliffs of Mistake

To know you're making a mistake as
you make it, yet not be able to stop,
is to step off a cliff, expecting to scramble
backwards and up through the air to stand
on the outcrop you stepped from,
even though it can't unhappen as you
backpeddle wildly with the second step,
looking far, far below onto the moraine
of pain you anticipate later, which is now
only the shock of recognizing the result
there’s no leaping back from.
Oh God, and this is only a metaphor.
Might this be what metaphors are for?
To say what it’s like
                                  before you hit what it is.

       Our Minor Art

We make love better unobserved — not that
we'd ever throw the new cats off the bed.
We let them sit there, turning their backs,
but listening anyway.  We don't move in bed
quite with the freedom we might without them,
but the fact that they stay is like being
visited by minor gods.  And we love the minor.
It inspires us because we like being
close to its genius — something we might come
to understand beyond our human bounds
but near to our kind — not like the major,
a capitalized God, for instance, or
upper-case Art.  Those are beyond us,
yet our transformation here in bed is art,
something best made unobserved, even by the cats,
who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.

      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.

The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw. 
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border. 
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turning blue field into sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.

Molly Peacock © 2008
Used with permission of W.W. Norton and Company