C.M. Crockford’s “Curtain” opens in a room of midday light, the speaker watching a lover “sprawled out, so confident.” The pose is feline and self-contained: the back arches “like a cat in the mid-day,” an image that mixes sensuous ease with a hint of performance. The title has already hinted at performance, though no actual curtain appears. Instead, the poem treats intimacy as a scene observed, framed, and then disrupted.
The poem moves in free verse, its short lines giving each phrase a momentary pause. The opening lines convey admiration. “Your torso is wonderfully imperfect” continues that admiration, but the phrase does more than flatter; it refuses idealization. The body is loved not despite its flaws but partly through them. Yet the next phrase, “A loose sigh, so designed that / I think of old films,” introduces something less settled. The word “designed” sits strangely against “loose,” as if even an involuntary breath can feel arranged. Then the line break delays the shift into memory—one moment the speaker is looking at the lover, the next an old film voice breaks in.
That interruption arrives as direct speech: “How can you love me?” The question is not attributed, which makes it all the more powerful. It may be the speaker’s remembered line from a film, the lover’s imagined voice, or the speaker’s own unspoken fear. The old film reference matters because it turns a private doubt into a familiar script, a scene we recognize from countless melodramas. Love, the poem suggests, brings with it a repertoire of old questions—about worth, beauty, and whether we deserve the ease we see in another person.
The closing couplet shifts outside: “Outside, something in the distance howls / if only for protection.” The word “something” is deliberately vague; the howl could belong to an animal, a machine, or a wind, but its source matters less than its emotional function. It is a sound from beyond the intimate room, and it carries loneliness into the poem’s warm interior. The phrase “if only for protection” is odd and affecting: a howl can be a call for help, a warning, or a way of making oneself known. The speaker may be projecting onto that distant sound the same need for reassurance behind the earlier question. The curtain of the title then becomes the boundary between inside and outside, safety and exposure, but also between the composed body and the unspoken fears beneath it.
What makes “Curtain” significant is its restraint. It does not explain the relationship, give the question an answer, or resolve the howl. Instead, it catches a moment in which physical closeness and emotional uncertainty coexist. The speaker can see confidence in the lover’s body, yet still hear an old film asking how such love is possible. The final image leaves the poem open, as if the question has escaped the room and found a voice outside. Crockford’s language stays plain—cat, torso, sigh, howl—but each word is placed so that it shifts the poem from a warm sketch into a small drama of self-doubt and tenderness. That balance between observed beauty and hidden fear gives the poem its quiet, uneasy power.