a self who despises intimacy

He has found someone else—not another person exactly, 

but a self who despises intimacy, as though the privacy of marriage 

is a door that two people shut together 

and no one can get out alone, not the wife, not the husband, 

so the heat gets trapped there until they suffocate, 

as though they were living in a phone booth. 

 

[Louise Glück {1943- }, from 'A Corridor', in Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry by William Logan]