Our final poem of the week is “Everything Always Distracts” from Fat Art, Thin Art by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Originally published in 1994, we’re thrilled to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of this book.
Oh Eve, help me erase those nastily scenic
afternoons with the goddamned objects
in the goddamned motel room, with both your and my
goddamned beauty; with me-your beloved-
grim, baffled, jaunty, looking
(as they say of gynecologists) in the pink,
which to us means the folded tissue of blood,
and you, dear naked girl, with the disposal of
this red explanatory lapful:
that’s not our love, which is pure voice
and also a steady touch in an inky room,
making a grown man want to think
his eyesight is a costly adult disease.
Your voice, mooded and languid under my voice,
too soft, not quite continuous, not quite
your own in the penetrated dark
touching and instructing my uncertain one, which is
more simply the riddled voice of sexual desire
and, afterwards, of unsleeping tristesse
reminds me a little of the touch of writing
to the reading it inhabits, trying to sustain.
(I know you think I’m being fancy, or just flat.
Wait, though, I’ve got more for you.) If
it finally happens, if we discover
a night we can spend together, a night to make good
what so far is only the raging sift of the detail
of impatient arousal, it won’t be more
our own than other nights. Everything always distracts,
A great friend of Duke University Press, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) was Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her many other publications with us include The Weather in Proust, Touching, Feeling, Tendencies, Novel Gazing, and Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank), and articles in a number of our journals.
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