The Papa and Mama Dance
Taking into consideration all your loveliness
why can’t you burn your bootsoles and your
draft card? How can you sit there saying yes
to war? You’ll be a pauper when you die, sore
boy. Dead, while I still live at our address.
Oh my brother, why do you keep making plans
when I am at seizures of hearts and hands?
Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;
bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ile de France,
the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa’s London Harness case
he took abroad and kept in our attic laced
with old leather straps for storage and his
scholar’s robes, black licorice – that metamorphoses
with its crimson hood. Remember we played costume –
bride black and black, black, black the groom?
Taking into consideration all your loveliness
the mad hours where once we danced on the sofa
screaming Papa, Papa, Papa, me in my dress,
my nun’s habit and you black as a hammer, a bourgeois
priest who kept leaping and leaping and leaping,
Oh brother, Mr. Gunman, why were you weeping,
investing curses for your sister’s pink, pink ear?
Taking aim and then, as usual, being sincere,
saying something dangerous, something egg-spotted
like I love you, ignoring the room where we danced,
ignoring the gin that could get us honestly potted,
and crying Mama, Mama, Mama, that old romance:
I tell you the dances we had were really enough,
your hands on my breast and all that sort of stuff.
Remember the yellow leaves that October day
when we married the tree hut and I didn’t go away?
Now I set here burying the attic and all of your
loveliness. If I jump on the sofa you just sit
in the corner and then you just bang on the door.
YOU WON’T REMEMBER! Yes, Mr. Gunman, that’s it!
Isn’t the attic familiar? Doesn’t the season
trample your mind? War, you say. War, you reason.
Please Mr. Gunman, dance one more, commenting
on costumes, holding them to your breast, lamenting
our black love and putting on that Papa dress.
Papa and Mama did so. Can we do less?
Anne Sexton