SEPTEMBER 2007

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What She Wanted

by Renée Ashley

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still...
— Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”

Not what you think. She imagined
love, yes, and the wings thrashing

with the force of it, white feathers,
white water, flashing all around,

and the breath at her neck, like a blade’s
keen side, one edge of his shameless

desire. And hers, she will tell you,
like a deft honing in cool water. She wanted him

like that. And she wanted him to risk
any small thing—his life, for instance,

if that were possible—to possess her.
She wanted him to traverse oceans, cross

silver bodies of perilous water; she wanted
him reflected there, and vulnerable—blind

to all but fierce need and the brave wind
teasing her hair; she wanted him unaware of wave

and precipitous rock. And she liked the word
tread, the idea of the watery fuck—

the cool shade at the steep, muddy banks
and the current in between. She wanted him

to own all that: the depths of need
and the body’s fallible knowledge.

How far one might go for love,
and the waters one crosses to get there.

Reprinted from The Revisionist’s Dream Avocet Press: Pearl River, NY (2001)

Renée Ashley

Renée Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry: Salt, Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Various Reasons of Light, The Revisionist’s Dream, and a chapbook, The Museum of Lost Wings, as well as a novel, Someplace Like This. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a contributing editor to The Literary Review, and is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her essay “Writing on the Brink: Peripheral Vision and the Personal Essay” will appear in the May/Summer issue of AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle. RENÉE ASHLEY IN THIS EDITION: SPOTLIGHT: A Voice Answering a Voice — A Conversation with Renée Ashley POEM: The Beautiful Girl is Disturbed POEM: What She Wanted POEM: Why I Never Came (Apology to My Mother)