“is the wet kiss / of your own pain.”

The Poem

Don’t Tell Anyone - Tony Hoagland

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss

of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.

The Beverage

Charles Smith Boom Boom! Syrah and Velvet Devil Merlot

Ooooh gimme that cheap screw top with a well-designed bottle! I love a screw top so much. Wine science has mostly made corks obsolete -- why are you still making me mess with them, winemakers?

These two wines are both extremely drinkable and good, and the labels are stylish so I feel good showing up with a bottle to a party.

I will never drink the Riesling or Chardonnay because I love myself and hate Riesling and any wine that even gives a sideways eye to the words oaky and buttery. But I do think I am going to pick up a bottle of the Cab after the gym. I know they have it at Safeway.

Love to shop for wine at Safeway. I am extremely high brow.