Explaning Rape Culture

Explaining Rape 
Culture

After Philip Levine’s “Desolation”

For you would hardly care

That you were less deceived, out on that bed,

Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair

To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic.

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Desolation

This last stanza after an epigraph of an account

by a ruined woman who wakes up concussed from drug

I want to catch you off

guard I want to feel if you really mean the man’s desolate

after he rapes the girl and is forever after a waste

or if he was already desolate and waited

for her with his syringes and pills and bottle of booze?

I tell you, I didn’t need any of that--all I needed

was a mother who wrapped marriage up in two silk words:

I DO.

It was duty and I took it from there.  I thought nothing

but laying it all down no matter what where why

into the (let me quote you) unanswerable light, tall and wide.

Let me say too that shame begins a long time before

the beds, a long time carding the shorn wool before the garment,

forbidding as it is, is worn.

I guess, yes, I get that.

I guess I can put that on

like a thick skin in August

but what I’m saying is the line’s crossed

when the fuck who fucks you without you there

(listen you’re there, but you leave, you know?)

without your hands and feet

without your teeth

is excused is curtsied to is Nose to the Toe examination afterward

come in the back door

and he’ll make it all ok again.  I ain’t buying that.

And don’t tell me he’s a damaged little boy

inside the biceps and calves of a man

who’ll hold me

down and swallow my nononono

like it’s vintage

like its his first time

like his ass has never been grabbed

by a guy like him

man I want to understand this:

               

                why I have to, twenty years on

                get out

                of bed

                wiping this shit

                up

                out of my head

and he’s pushing himself into a new pair of boots

and a new wife.  I’m saying this: 

Don't make excuses.  I’ll take it if you don’t take his

desolation as more costly on his soul as mine: ---

Yes, like you say: my mind does lay open
like a drawer of knives.  I'm willing to say I've taken it
out of context, but not today.  Maybe in another twenty
years.  How else???