“Never say that marriage has more of joy than pain.”
—Euripides
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. Night Doctrine
The table keeps its vigil with the phone,
its blank black mouth, the patient little sin—
like frost against the ear, the static thin—
no pulse returning through the copper bone,
no summons coming from a hungry ghost—
a wire gone slack along a plaster rim—
your shadow learning how to counterfeit your skin,
a body pacing circuits of its own.
They salt the tongue, they cauterize the air,
they know this craft—the living make their mark:
erase the warmth that once could make a life
until the map of someone else’s small affair
collapses—street by street—through winter dark—
and leaves you there—still waiting every night.
V. 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.
jaznoblog 