By Dennis Sampson

Featured Art: Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View by Egon Schiele

It took him a lifetime to figure out
he hadn’t the slightest idea
who she was. Rereading
Milton’s Paradise Lost one night,
he elected to set things right. He would recall

what had never dawned on him
in an epithalamion of all their vows,
her face as gray and drawn and haunted now
as that which miraculously appeared
to Milton in his sonnet “Methought I Saw.”
He’d been blind

and completely missed what she’d put up with for so long,
his cigar smoke stinking up the whole house
composing his small diatribes,
his holding court on everything
from Boccaccio to the state of the art.

Hadn’t she once confessed to him
when they were courting,
cuddled in his loft with the fire down to a hush,
she had waited all of her life
to be touched like this? What was that called?

Three days he labored over his encomium
—a litany of his own faux pas—
until he had to admit he could not get it right,
this catalogue which kept coming up
against forgetting absolutely everything from the start.

Dennis Sampson‘s most recent book is Selected Poems.

Originally published in NOR 6