Weltschmertz Poem by gershon hepner

Though you say you feel my power
long before you yield
in your bed, where I’m a flower
like those in a field
goats love to eat, I sense that you have felt
me to be insincere,
and will withdraw from you with Welt-
schmertz, and disappear.

Inspired by a story in the June 1,2009 New Yorker, by Craig Raine, Love Affair with Secondaries:
As soon as Agnieszka arrived, Piotr put the chain on the door, and the pair undressed quickly and silently on opposite sides of the sofa bed. Like a married couple in a cold room. But the thick curve of his erection was ready before they even touched. He could smell her genitals across the tartan blanket—the blanket with tell-tail tassels which she always brought in her tote bag. She took off her spectacles. On the sofa bed, she seldom repeated herself. This particular afternoon, as her features warped with pleasure, Piotr heard her agonized whisper, “I want to, aah, push your stiff red, aah, into another woman’s...” And he came, too. Afterward, they talked, always about the same thing—Piotr’s postcoital desire to end the affair and Agnieszka’s passionate opposition. “We are like mayflies. We live only for an afternoon, and we must take whatever joy is given us.” This was the argument she always urged.Piotr thought of the tests he had undergone—the barium meals, the endoscopies, the soreness of his throat after tubes had been pushed down it, the yellow bruise in the crook of his arm where blood had been taken. But there was also something comic in her chosen image for man’s transience—the indestructible trope of the doomed mayfly. And he thought of the character in Chekhov’s “Ivanov” who says that mankind is like a flower in a field. Along comes a goat—no more flower. The earpieces of Agnieszka’s spectacles, he noticed, were arranged around a bottle of Basia’s perfume, brought back from England by her sister. Je Reviens.


6/2/09