Monday Poems: "Incubus" -- by Craig Arnold

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs

on the peg over hers, and he's inside.  

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,  

buys herself a minute looking for two  

matching cups for the lime-flower tea,  

not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves  

and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.  

She talks a wall around her, twists the string  

tighter around the tea bag in her spoon.  

But every conversation has to break  

somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa  

he sits, warming his hands around the cup  

he hasn't tasted yet, and listens on  

with such an exasperating show of patience  

it's almost a relief to hear him ask it:  

If you're not using your body right now

maybe you'd let me borrow it for a while?

It isn't what you're thinking. No, it's worse.  

Why on earth did she find him so attractive  

the first time she met him, propping the wall  

at an awkward party, clearly trying to drink  

himself into some sort of conversation?  

Was it the dark uncomfortable reserve  

she took upon herself to tease him out of,  

asking, Are you a vampire? That depends,  

he stammered, are you a virgin? No, not funny,  

but why did she laugh at him? What made her think  

that he needed her, that she could teach him something?  

Why did she let him believe she was drunk  

and needed a ride home? Why did she let him  

take her shirt off, fumble around a bit  

on the spare futon, passing back and forth  

the warm breath of a half-hearted kiss  

they kept falling asleep in the middle of?  

And when he asked her, why did she not object?  

I'd like to try something. I need you to trust me.  

Younger and given to daydreams, she imagined  

trading bodies with someone, a best friend,  

the boy she had a crush on. But the fact  

was more fantastic, a fairy-tale adventure  

where the wolf wins, and hides in the girl's red hood.  

How it happens she doesn't really remember,  

drifting off with a vague sense of being  

drawn out through a single point of her skin,  

like a bedsheet threaded through a needle's eye,

and bundled into a body that must be his.  

Sometimes she startles, as on the verge of sleep  

you can feel yourself fall backward over a brink,  

and snaps her eyelids open, to catch herself  

slipping out of the bed, her legs swinging  

over the edge, and feels the sudden sick  

split-screen impression of being for a second  

both she and her.  

                              What he does with her  

while she's asleep, she never really knows,  

flickers, only, conducted back in dreams:  

Walking in neighborhoods she doesn't know  

and wouldn't go to, overpasses, ragweed,  

cars dry-docked on cinderblocks, wolf-whistles,  

wanting to run away and yet her steps  

planted sure and defiant. Performing tasks  

too odd to recognize and too mundane  

to have made up, like fixing a green salad  

with the sunflower seeds and peppers that she hates,  

pouring on twice the oil and vinegar  

that she would like, and being unable to stop.  

Her hands feel but are somehow not her own,  

running over the racks of stacked fabric  

in a clothing store, stroking the slick silk,  

teased cotton and polar fleece, as if her fingers  

each were a tongue tasting the knits and weaves.  

Harmless enough.  

                              It's what she doesn't dream  

that scares her, panic she can't account for, faces  

familiar but not known, déjà vu  

making a mess of memory, coming to  

with a fresh love-bite on her left breast  

and the aftershock of granting another's flesh,  

of having gripped, slipped in and fluttered tender  

mmm, unbraided, and spent the whole slow day  

clutching her thighs to keep the chafe from fading,  

and furious at being joyful, less  

at the violation, less the danger, than the sense  

he'd taken her enjoyment for his own.  

That was the time before, the time she swore  

would be the last—returning to her senses,  

she'd grabbed his throat and hit him around the face  

and threw him out, and sat there on the floor  

shaking. She hadn't known how hard it was  

to throw a punch without pulling it back.  

Now, as they sit together on her couch  

with the liquid cooling in the stained chipped cups  

that would never match, no matter how hard  

she stared at them, he seems the same as ever,  

a quiet clumsy self-effacing ghost  

with the gray-circled eyes that she once wanted  

so badly to defy, that seemed to see her  

seeing him—and she has to admit, she's missed him.  

Why? She scrolls back through their conversations,  

searching for any reason not to hate him.  

She'd ask him, What's it like being a girl  

when you're not a girl? His answers, when he gave them,  

weren't helpful, so evasively poetic:  

It's like a sponge somebody else is squeezing.

A radio tuned to all stations at once.

Like having skin that's softer but more thick.

Then she remembers the morning she awoke  

with the smear of tears still raw across her cheeks  

and the spent feeling of having cried herself  

down to the bottom of something. Why was I crying?  

she asked, and he looked back blankly, with that little  

curve of a lip that served him for a smile.  

Because I can't.

                              And that would be their secret.  

The power to feel another appetite  

pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold  

lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke,  

fill her and then be stilled. The freedom to fall  

asleep behind the blinds of his dark body  

and wake cleanly. And when she swings her legs  

over the edge of the bed, to trust her feet  

to hit the carpet, and know as not before  

how she never quite trusted the floor  

to be there, no, not since she was a girl  

first learning to swim, hugging her skinny  

breastless body close to the pool-gutter,  

skirting along the dark and darker blue  

of the bottom dropping out—

                              Now she can stand,  

and take the cup out of his giving hand,  

and feel what they have learned inside each other  

fair and enough, and not without a kind  

of satisfaction, that she can put her foot  

down, clear to the bottom of desire,  

and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.

*     *     *     *     *

Craig Arnold taught poetry at the University of Wyoming and published two books of poetry--Shells (1999) and Made Flesh (2008)--before his untimely death in 2009. He earned his BA from Yale University and his PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah.

Arnold won the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship. 

While traveling in Japan, Arnold went missing on a solo hike. His body was never recovered and he was assumed to have died from a fatal fall.