Margot Wizansky

To Love in That Insane Tortured Way

                        From “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen”
by Dante Di Stefano

Love was supposed to be torture, I believed.
He came to me after I’d married another man.
It was dark in my memory and I was alone,
though it was no doubt daytime, that tender
green Pennsylvania spring, and it reminded me
of what we’d been to each other, first spring
of our awakening. He had a way of showing up.
He looked at me like he wanted to say something,
but didn’t. He never touched me. I was terrified
I’d be found out, accused of inviting him.
At the Gardner Museum last week I thought of him,
the portrait of him I did so many years ago, his name
I painted in Spanish down one side. I wanted to appear
indifferent like Madame X in Sargent’s painting. As if
my shoulders were bared to him like hers in that strapless
gown, I couldn’t be aloof. He’d left me and I was
too angry to forgive him. The first of serial betrayals.
He hadn’t had strength enough to defy his father,
to tell me what he felt for me, yet he couldn’t let me go.
Last time I ran into him, it was at a concert. My then-husband
said something to him I couldn’t hear, maybe threatening
to murder him if he came near me. Today I’m watching
the ocean, pale under a pale sky streaked with trails of cloud,
thinking my life’s become less colorful, closing down.
How would things have been if he hadn’t left me,
if I hadn’t begun to live recklessly, leapt into
an ill-considered marriage and was betrayed again,
before it turned out this way, sea lavender blooming
every spring, its delicate color almost no color,
the tiny precious flowers, my precious days,
not insane, not tortured.

Margot Wizansky’s poems have appeared in Missouri Review, Bellevue, and elsewhere. She edited What the Poem Knows, won residencies with Carlow University, Innisfree, Ireland, and with Writers@Work. Lily Poetry Review published Wild for Life. Kelsay Books, The Yellow Sweater, and her new collection Random Music in a Small Galaxy (2025).