Playing the Nanny to Be With You

It was the winter I'd come home in three-o'clock dusk
and make love to you with an icy desire.
I wore inside my wrists the teeth marks
of a child who laughed at me, and sometimes your marks
overlapped the child's on my body. Why did it seem dusk
all the time? I felt your desire

that was just as exhaustive. Then you'd switch on the desk lamp
to read from Genesis; and in my corner, by the fire,
I read Jane Eyre, obsessed and half afraid that I'd have to face
that woman in the attic—her black ravings and scarred face.
Watching your eyes brighten by the lamp,
I believed you would abandon me to the fire.

Next year, when each morning the sky
is another low ceiling, when the child
in my care hides too long in the basement, I will move
with clumsier, more forgetful hands. My life in America before I moved
to join you—long library nights, mornings at the sea—was swallowed in the sky.
You said to me, "We love each other." I lay down with that like a child.

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