“Never say that marriage has more of joy than pain.”

-Euripedes

 

I. The Estranged Wife

 

A poem needs rooms, it needs the conceit

of a history. Seal this history

in an envelope, push it underneath

a lonely woman’s door. Make it evening.

Give her things she can use: a living room,

a fireplace, a small lamp on a table,

a telephone, a window, the moon,

a row of photographs on the mantel.

Sometime after midnight, the telephone

will ring. When she answers, she may study

the pictures, then come to a conclusion.

Her left ear is warm. She is listening.

Every picture is a discrete moment

which has indiscreetly lost its moment.

II. Twilight of the Idols

 

The day passes, the autumn light slanting

through the blinds and onto the window ledge

as the sun tangents the tips of the trees.

Our two black cats hide underneath the bed

when an airplane passes in the distance,

its low rumble lingering in the sky

then tapering slowly into silence

along with the last vestiges of light.

The neighborhood dogs bark in unison

at some indiscernible animal

and the blue glow of the television

casts cobalt shadows on the bedroom wall.

I pull you toward me to kiss your neck,

your cold back pressing against my stomach.

III. The Lucid Husband

 

The moon crystallized to sugar last night,

Ants crawled over its surface, gathering

in craters, visible to naked eyes.

It was shaping into a strange morning:

the paper was delivered an hour late,

our cat menaced a bag in the corner—

outside the front window, a meter maid

wrote tickets without pausing her scooter,

like Lao Tzu scribbling the Tao Te Ching

on horseback. Even more peculiar:

the furniture was gone—the house empty,

save for a small radio on the floor,

Patsy Cline’s sweet tremolo now drifting

from the living room into the kitchen.

IV. Lover’s Leap

 

A phone is ringing in the upstairs room.

You answer it politely in your mind—

perhaps your future ghost is calling you,

to tell you now to look beneath the blinds,

carefully pull upon the vinyl string

and bare the pages of a tattered will

purposely lodged between the frosted teeth

of a splintered pane and the window sill,

a checklist for the hopeful suicide

to review before some Brechtian leap—

just a cursory glance may well suffice

to nudge you further from the edge of sleep.

Feed the cat. Return your physician’s call.

Make sure you clear the hedges when you fall.