A Poem for the New Year

"Tess of the D'Ubervilles"

Always carry a gun for the day you'll need it. 
Bury your baby at the crossroads. 
Forgive yourself for not waiting. 
What kind of husband leaves you pregnant
and stays gone that long? 
Kill the man who murdered your heart,
whispering over and over,
He's not coming back.

With her proud, hotel maid's shoulders pulled back,
Nora sat in the park across from the train station, there
in Trieste without knowing if Joyce would return. 
Having nowhere else to go, she waited out the hours. 
That's how it is when you go from Ireland to Austria
with a man who's not your husband, just another
tale of two cities with french doors and revolution.

Roman Polanski will make a film about you. 
Corrupt or not, he would understand
the fierce pull of your heart
the baby's dying
the husband's coming back too late
the shot that washed you clean in floodwaters of light
the drowned hope and stone-pummeled corpse of love
pushed out to sea. 

Polanski will end the film at Stonehenge,
you at the height of your beauty,
a place never reached without money.
By that time, you will know how to bring
the trinity, the a trois, in tableau.

There's Angel, a man worse than Alec.
There's Alec, sorry enough all by himself.
Kill both the men who murdered your heart. 
You never lacked courage. 

— Lee McCarthy, published in DAYBREAK: A Journal of Poetry and Conversation (2000)