Andrea Selch

“The next to last poem, and the collection’s longest, ‘The Field-Biologist’s Girlfriend,‘ ranges from love and loss to global issues... Selch’s poem works the global into the personal and suggests there is no more mythic, poetic past with ‘a boundless forest / for the words to warble through.’”

The Field Biologist’s Girlfriend
 2 - At home

Each day while she’s gone I walk her dog for her—
the short route past the old houses we like most, or
the long way, past the new one we watched get built
amidst six blue longleaf pines, now nearly finished,
its back porch kindly cut out around one red, knobby trunk.

Fridays, always late, the blue hound dragging me
the long way, I see for once the insides
of those houses, in yellow light,
but just the tops of hanging pictures, or archways
into further rooms where others think of supper.

When we were first together, out by myself
on these same streets, I thought the others
were as troubled as I felt, all suppers bungled,
all couples eventually, instead of loving, settling
for the television’s phosphor blue.

But tonight, and not by chance, I see in
to the glint of glasses on each table—here a candle,
there a flower—and know, as I write her, “now
the new house has electricity,” that I and
all the others don’t settle for the blues, but conspire
to have our loves, like city pines, continue thriving.
  (January, 1995)