“I’ll call you “Stanley”, I said, rather stupidly, On our first date. I didn’t like your name, And I’ve just read Tennessee Williams, And you looked a bit like a Stanley too. You didn’t get offended, at all, instead, Your brows raised in amusement, And you said “Okay”, and laughter danced in your eyes, As they say. But it danced indeed. I didn’t call you Stanley for long, I invented million other names, as you did for me, I became a Stella to you, Even though you never read the book and didn’t know that I’m a Stella. Yet I was probably onto something, A Stanley lived inside you all right, And I got defiant. Sometimes a Stella, Sometimes a Blanche. I drove you mad; you drove me mad, Maybe I was mad already by the time I met you, I just didn’t know that yet. Time went by, and I became Blanche more and more, Sometimes it felt oceans between us, And we tried to swim back, but the current was way too strong. And million names became one, but we didn’t say it, One becomes beyond vast for the other, to be given a proper name, He’s a multitude, there is no getting rid of him, you’re plagued with All this crawling and rustling of wings. And there’s constant blooming and booming and bleeding inside you, Scarlet flowers on Monte-Cassino, “How we fell down among those flowers”. And then somebody’s getting deadly tired of the battles, Throws in a towel and makes a call, So, you’ll go to where you belonged in the first place. You and me, we managed not to call, that's how We both stayed out of the places with bars on windows, just separately, All our names saved somewhere, Including these we never dared to utter. All Stanleys, Stellas, and Blanches, and Mitches, And unnamed nurses, unfazed by anything, And that old streetcar, that somewhere Still runs its course without us, remember, how We clutched onto each other when it suddenly made a turn?
Thank you so much for the restack, @Dave pearen....I'm very grateful
Thank you so much, @Fotini. It's really humbling
I really love how this poem pulls us into the streetcar at the end. It's a whole story of a relatioship with one metaphor.
Thank you so much, Tresha. Thank you