Poetry Monday

Woman Police Officer in Elevator

by James Lasdun

Not that I’d ever noticed

Either a taste or a distaste

For that supposedly arousing

Rebus of pain and desire, the uniformed woman,

Whether as Dietrich in epaulettes,

Or armored like Penthesileia, or in thigh boots

And cocked hat, straddling the Atlantic,

Fishing for campesinos

With live torpedoes,

But when the rattling, john-sized

Tenement elevator paused

Mid-fall to blink a female housing cop

Into its humid cranium, I felt her presence

Spooling through me like a Mobius strip,

Splicing her spilling curls, nightstick, the gun at her hip,

Chrome shield, the breast it emblazoned,

Seamlessly into the same

Restless continuum …

I caught – was it possible? –

The scent of some sweet-tinctured oil;

Troubling, alluring; and looked away

The glanced back obliquely: had I imagined it,

The sudden scimitar-glint of danger,

Or had some forbidden impulse – longing, lust, anger –

Tumid inside me like a hidden

Semiautomatic

In a schoolkid’s lunch  pack,

Triggered the blue-lashed, tiny

Metal detector of her eye?

I backed against my corner, watching

The numerals slowly swallow their green gulp of light;

Interminable! And as we fell,

Our little locked cube of stale air seemed to bristle

With a strange menace … I thought of harms;

My own and not my own,

Contemplated or done;

Betrayals, infidelities,

Coercions, seductions, lies,

Ready to confess them all, and more,

As if in her firm indifference she’d regressed me

Inward down some atavistic line

To the original essence, the masculine

Criminal salt; a frieze of victims

Paneled in my own skull

Like a lit cathedral hell …

A shudder, and then stillness;

Avoidance of each other’s eyes

As in some bedroom fiasco’s wake,

The air too brimful with disclosure, till the door

Opened and we parted, the clamped rift

Between us widening like a continental drift

Of the sexes; she to the butcher, the breaker,

The ripper, the rapist,

I to my therapist.