Ambivalence

A few while ago i found myself walking from a very late dinner with one friend to meeting two other friends for dancing and drinking. My get up wasn't too provocative a simple red dress with a black top and one inch heels. Hardly a tawdry looking number. And yet while walking for several blocks i got at least two cat calls. Hey baby, looking fiiiine. And there lied the confusion. Sure i was annoyed (and little bit scared since walking alone at two o'clock in the morning is not the brightest idea), but part of me was secretly flattered. Here i was acknowledged as desired but it was the lowliest of kind of desire. The elemental that is vital to our survival yet which we reject on the basis of its pedestrian nature. This ambivalence always reminds me of the Denise Levertov poem The Mutes. The last three lines always get me.

The Mutes

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:

so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can't,


it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors


spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
'Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.'