'The Imagined' by Stephen Dunn (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

When my kids ask me why I won't watch horror movies, I tell them it's because nothing scares me any more. It's not true of course, it's only things that are intended to scare me that don't scare me: I'm too old to be fooled by the same old nonsense again. One of the working girls in Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday said "I can scream three times at a rubber lizard and then the Hell with it."

However this poem scares me: it's like the idea that everything you hold precious is a sham, a facade, a deception. Here's a very scary little poem by Hilaire Belloc:

Life is a long discovery, isn't it?
You only get your wisdom bit by bit.
If you have luck you find in early youth
How dangerous it is to tell the Truth;
And next you learn how dignity and peace
Are the ripe fruits of patient avarice.
You find that middle life goes racing past.
You find despair: and, at the very last,
You find as you are giving up the ghost
That those who loved you best despised you most.

The paintings of men and women with impassive faces are by Alex Katz.

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefullness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,
would you want to know that she slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she's made for him, that he's present even when
you're eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

[thissongyou]

What's to fear, Tom, "if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, " provided the imagined woman remains in your imagination and the real woman remains real? I really like this poem. I had not heard it before. As always, your lovely reading stirs my imagination.

[effentjes]

He slips in to her life. not she slips into