Rebecca Hazelton

I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you. We’ll talk about kids but make plans to travel. I will remember your eyes as green when they were gray. Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly. Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better. There will be small things. I will pick up your damp towel from the bed, and then I won’t. I won’t be as hot as I was when I wasn’t yours and your hairline now so untrustworthy. When we pull up alongside a cattle car and hear the frightened lows, I will silently judge you for not immediately renouncing meat. You will bring me wine and notice how much I drink. The garden you plant and I plant is tunneled through by voles, the vowels we speak aren’t vows, but there’s something holding me here, for now, like your eyes, which I suppose are brown, after all.

World like a coat, silver clasps, ermine lined, warm with the dead inside, rolling around in the red center—I thought everything had a purpose—this was back when I still drank—and wasn’t I a special traveler, nestled in that pocket amongst the butterscotch candies, the matchbooks? Unessential but accounted for, a steady thing to touch. World like a morning glory, withered every evening, world like a bristling dog, terrified of thunder—I can’t believe how I believed, or how that belief assumed a shape around my body, taking on the imprint of my heat, gaining solidity. When anyone questioned me, I held it forth, let them touch the sleeve—I needed nothing. World like an egret, still and white on the highway divider, world like a regret typed out and then erased—I cannot hold you any closer without everyone seeing, I cannot hold you at all, it seems, your evergreens, your curling potato vine; it’s all too much much, and I a bit of goosedown, a thistle fluff, naked and hatless, unaccounted for and extra, the world like a world like a world.

They were not traditionalists. They could bear the innovations of plot. They could not wait to landscape the plot. They had plans for a bed of pansies because pansies hardly ever die in a cold snap, because pansies are hardy despite the name. When they shoved the trowel into the soil it was with his hand on the handle and hers                                                                            adding force. They knew there were only nine types of people in the world and they knew which ones would close the deal. They knew the shirkers by sight. They had options. They knew about Required Communication. About how I feel and you feel. When there was a question of who did the dishes and who did the cat box, it was settled in-house and never required an outside contractor. But the pansies got stem spot, leaf rot, and mildew. When they looked at their options it seemed there weren’t really that many after all. They swore to uphold the bonds and the principles and the yelling. They swore to oral sex. They dressed to the nines and they walked the aisle. They stood up and received the standard narration.

The boy and the girl were mostly gesture, a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, lowering to get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milk and scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoop of ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket. Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circles and planar suggestion. If  the girl wants to be a horse she need only walk into the outline of one and line up her body with the chest. We’ll fill in the rest, and before you know it, she’s a natural. Who will ride her? The boy doesn’t know how. He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle. When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle. He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says, which doesn’t seem like what little boys say, but he wasn’t so little, and she didn’t run away.

They call it sacrifice—            imagine me a tiny poppy on a field of green felt—brief blip of color, limitless expanse. I’ve never felt foreign, or like a lash in his eye. If it’s not love, it’s very like. Most days it feels the same— exacting—he tweezes the stray thoughts from my speech, cleans up my heart with a tortoiseshell comb. Every lady should have such a man, edging her lawn with a sharp rotary blade. Year by year—let’s call it always— editor and editrix. Engaged against a flurry of typos, showered in revisionist white out. I erase his crow’s feet, buff away his frown. My head—he yawns it open, scoops out dark foam, yesses I’ve regretted, the tiny poppy everyone sees flapping to pieces— And so, we are growing taller, sweeter, ratified in the glow of the big correction.

I’m having trouble understanding the wife. The wife seems like she is only there as a foil to your actions. I want to know how the wife feels when you drag her and your son down into the basement to start a new religion. The religion has something to do with cowering before a force greater than yourself and then being buried alive. I want to know how the wife behaves in small, enclosed spaces: if she is trying to comfort your son by telling him Daddy likes to play funny games, or if she is already visualizing herself walking into a women’s shelter, your son on her back and maybe, because this is a fantasy, she carries a burning torch, like an angry villager, or a goddess. Does the wife merit any revenge after you weed whack the coffee table? Does she agree with you that the coffee table is yours to destroy because you built it? What has she built in the house that is hers to destroy? What kind of childhood has the wife endured that allows her to understand you? In her past life or lives, was the wife ever a shepherdess? Does she see you as a sort of Pan, goatish, and pricked by ticks, but also very well-endowed? When the wife transforms into a tree can she still think or is she just a green haze inside, an idea of growing? I would like to see the wife peel off that bark, leaving only enough for modesty’s sake, although as this is your poem, we can take a bit more off. I want to see her uproot herself, pick up the house and shake it. How many people fall out? The wife has something about her the Germans would call unheimlich. I sometimes catch a glimpse of the wife out of the corner of my eye but then I look away. I cannot look directly at the wife. The wife is a conflagration of everything dear. I wonder sometimes if she is faking; There is a certain note she holds too long so the orgasm is more operatic, less genuine. When she cries,Oh my God, really, she should stutter. Let’s say the wife wakes up in the morning. You have already made breakfast. Does your kindness feel oppressive? Does she want to take your weed whacker through the house? Has she ever, in a fit of anger, destroyed your pornography? When you found a picture of the wife online with a foreign handprint smacked red on her ass, how quickly did your shock turn to arousal? Are you aware the wife is breaking down in public places, and sometimes cannot move for thirty minutes? Sometimes her arm goes entirely numb from the shoulder down. I think the wife might need some fine-tuning, some elbow grease, some wrenching apart, and then reassembling.

Before the war leaned in and blew out the candles, there were many long days where lovers called themselves lovers and a house was a dream but also four walls, a roof. A father called to his daughter to see the monarch butterflies, pausing in their migration to fan the goldenrod, a tiger in each coy disclosure. A young man reached for a blackberry and found draped on a branch a green snake the color of matcha. A snake the color of matcha sighed in the sun. People drove in cars. There were jobs and someone had to work every morning. A man quit his job but it was no tragedy. He didn’t like the work. Another man slid in and found it comfortable enough, and just as easily slid in beside the man’s wife and into the everyday rhythms of his life and that was no tragedy either. After rains, a ring of mushrooms would delicately crack the earth. Spanish moss harbored red mites. The sky wasn’t interesting. No one looked up.

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift, there were words for cover which ripped them off, there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed, promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice, that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs of this time, and I can only go by what others tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate, I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls were under siege from smaller men who called themselves heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world. I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it as around my fortifications one man pulled another man behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was, that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall, which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear, and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers, and he turned from my beauty and said my name.

A dirigible powered us through the first leg, traversing snow-capped mountains where goats leapt from crags, and men with wrinkled apples faces looked up, pointed. Smiling to cold air, I slept under a bear skin, touched your lips in the night. On our pleasant soap bubble journey, we dropped baskets down each morning, hooked meats, cheeses; in later weeks, nothing. Still, we took notes, detailing the weather conditions, the migrating elk numbers and their steady decrease. Northward by cracked compass, the sleet sheeting the balloon drove us low, then lower— In time we cut through the ice, sank fathoms into the sea, chaperoned by seals that are not mermaids at all. Else you think this a hoax, know my hand— down here still—please send help.