Page 8 - WTP Vol.VII #3

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annoyed by even the thought of her flunky husband, looked up from her muff as she met Dimitri on the back stairs of the opera house, his formal coat,
his silk cravat— her fair hair falling in weepy locks— when they couldn’t help but swallow the space spinning between their bodies—couldn’t help but inhale those wafting intoxicants down the long road ahead to the impossible.
DeNicola is the author of six books, her most recent, Original Human, a poetry collection, and The Future That Brought Her Here, a memoir. She compiled and edited the anthology Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology, from UPNE press. Previous books include Where Divinity Begins from Alice James Books and four chapbooks, two of which were award winners. Among other awards, she has been the recipient of an NEA grant. She is an as- sociate editor for The South Florida Poetry Journal.
Deborah DeNicola
The Impossible
—Chekov, “The Lady with the Pet Dog”
—They could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband.
Rain today. Sepia tinting the onion domes in St. Petersburg square,
and they can scarcely remember Yalta that August when the lilac-
hued water sparked the harbor and current surged between them
like lit kerosene. Perhaps if she hadn’t walked her white Pomeranian down to the sea. Perhaps if it had bitten Dmitri or pissed on his summer
shoes—and Anna—so taken with his hair—how it tinseled in sunlight. By nightfall she had fallen through the sturgeon blue of his eyes.
Even after they parted, abandoned their sultry moon, neither realized the damage done in that hotel room, though Anna wore her guilt
like the heavy crimson drapes. And as each returned to the proper—
(but so mediocre)—spouse, something within Dimitri shifted, broke open— this late in his life, to peer through a lorgnette and see up close
a new world within—the new self from a foreign realm, forgotten but true, a self soft as goose down, one who found joy in daily life—but “How?
How?” Dimitri cried. And why now, between these rough kisses,
after his tower of past dalliances amounted to nothing? After he’d settled
for brief salvos of cheating year after year, and all kept from his intimidating wife. Why had this fading angel lanced his heart so that dread bled when he—
who had always been immune—found love now as a lethal injection
envenoming the future. And Anna, months later, that night in S—