Stephen Scaer

The Public Loved her Wednesday

The wrinkles made it hard to be Millay —
the naughty, love-intoxicated elf
who put her indiscretions on display
to keep her verses flying off the shelf.
Though she was quick to give her love away,
she found no one as lovely as herself.
At thirty-six she had a mid-life crisis
and sought a younger partner for her vices.

She spent her dissipating charms to snare
George Dillon, twenty-one. Oh! He was cute.
A poet who had all his teeth and hair
(and headed for a Pulitzer to boot).
They publicized an adequate affair
which quickly bore Millay artistic fruit
in songs of love. When their romance was through,
she published them as Fatal Interview.

She documented each romantic joy,
straining the limit of her lyric art.
It was for her the Greeks invaded Troy,
not even death would cure her wounded heart.
She bandied words with Venus and her boy,
but never named a reproductive part.
Writing a paean to the arrowy child
was Vincent’s way of saying she went wild.

She had a husband who was undemanding,
although she hardly mentions poor Eugene.
Of course the couple had an understanding.
That didn’t stop the cuckold turning green,
but not enough to think about disbanding
while she was busy playing slave and queen.
She found her lapses easy to excuse
as long as critics gave her rave reviews.

But aging isn’t subject to reverses.
Prematurely superannuated
by booze and dope, she slurred a stream of curses
when critics called her forms and diction dated.
They traded in Millay for freer verses,
and some proclaimed that she’d been overrated.
In increments, she lost what she loved most,
and haunted her estate as her own ghost.

Bohemians still propagate the fiction
this libertine who used her friends to sate her
salacious whims and carnal predilections
had really been her gender’s liberator
when she was just a slave to her addictions.
But who am I to judge her decades later
from second-hand accounts that don’t quite mesh?
I wish that I had known her in the flesh.