13 Divorce poems

Standing at the baggage passing time: Austin Texas airport—my ride hasn’t come yet. My former wife is making websites from her home, one son’s seldom seen, the other one and his wife have a boy and girl of their own. My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town so she can get to high school. My mother ninety-six still lives alone and she’s in town too, always gets her sanity back just barely in time. My former former wife has become a unique poet; most of my work, such as it is             is done. Full moon was October second this year, I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine owl hoots and rattling antlers, Castor and Pollux rising strong —it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts! that even our present night sky slips away, not that I’ll see it. Or maybe I will, much later, some far time walking the spirit path in the sky, that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the “narrow painful passageway of the Bardo” squeeze your little skull and there you are again waiting for your ride (October 5, 2001)

People getting divorced riding around with their clothes in the car and wondering what happened to everyone and everything including their other pair of shoes And if you spy one then who knows what happened to the other with tongue alack and years later not even knowing if the other ever found a mate without splitting the seams or remained intact unlaced and the sole ah the soul a curious conception hanging on somehow to walk again in the free air once the heel has been replaced

There was a bucket, there was a wall, there was a woman and a man. The woman carried the bucket and the man was the wall. There was no place else to go. It was a long, long time for there was much to carry and there was much to wall. There was a path ran straight from the well to the hole in the wall. There was a path ran crooked from the well to the wood. There was something in the wood bigger than the bucket. Woe to the man, woe to the wall. Woe to the bucket at the edge of the wood.

The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts is understandable. The divorced father does not cook confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner. The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability kids approve of melted cheese on pizza years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations. So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad. Before the dad has finished his second slice, the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail that can't quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left and the divorced father doesn't want them wasted, there has been enough waste already; he sits there in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It's good except the crust is actually not so great— after the second slice the crust is basically a chore— so you leave it. You move on to the next loaded slice. Finally there you are amid rims of crust. All this is understandable. There's no dark conspiracy. Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them and dumps the rims of crust which are not corpses on a battlefield. Understandability fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there's no room for anything else. Now he's at the door summoning the kids and they follow, of course they do, he's a dad.

My wedding-ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well. Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again. It lies among keys to abandoned houses, nails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall, telephone numbers with no names attached, idle paperclips. It can’t be given away for fear of bringing ill-luck It can’t be sold for the marriage was good in its own time, though that time is gone. Could some artificer beat into it bright stones, transform it into a dazzling circlet no one could take for solemn betrothal or to make promises living will not let them keep? Change it into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone. He has loved her voice and listens with attention to every modulation of its tone. Knowing it intimately. Not knowing what he wants from the sound of it, from the tendered civility. He studies, out the window, the seed shapes of the broken pods of ornamental trees. The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches, a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber. A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian, lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white, patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

I Why should a foolish marriage vow, Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now, When passion is decayed? We loved, and we loved, as long as we could, Till our love was loved out in us both; But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: ’Twas pleasure first made it an oath. II If I have pleasures for a friend, And further love in store, What wrong has he, whose joys did end, And who could give no more? ’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, Or that I should bar him of another: For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain, When neither can hinder the other.

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth, fighting my sleep, and one night saw a Hessian soldier stand at attention there in full regalia, till his head broke into flames. My only other callers were the FBI sent to investigate me as a Russian spy by patriotic neighbors on the river road; and flying squirrels parachuting from the elms who squeaked in rodent heat between the walls and upstairs rumbled at their nutty games. I never dared open the attic door. Even my nervous Leghorns joined the act, indulging their taste for chicken from behind. A glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes; they caught a sort of dancing-sickness, a variation of the blind staggers, that hunched their narrow backs and struck a stiffened wing akimbo, as round and round the poultry yard they flapped and dropped and flapped again. The county agent shook his head: not one of them was spared the cyanide. That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe: red pine and white, larch, balsam fir, one stride apart, two hundred to the row, until I heard from Rossiter’s woods the downward spiral of a veery’s song unwinding on the eve of war. Lord! Lord! who has lived so long? Count it ten thousand trees ago, five houses and ten thousand trees, since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower over the place where the hermit sang, while I held a fantail of squirming roots that kissed the palm of my dirty hand, as if in reply to a bird. The stranger who hammers No Trespass signs to the staghorn sumac along the road must think he owns this property. I park my car below the curve and climbing over the tumbled stones where the wild foxgrape perseveres, I walk into the woods I made, my dark and resinous, blistered land, through the deep litter of the years.

“So,” she said, sipping tea from a Chinese oxblood cup, “did anything good happen because of your divorce?” “Well, my emotional palette is wider now. It includes colors like,” I paused... “like that.” I pointed to the cup. In southeast Winnemucca bypass Route 7 connects two segments of Route 2 I love you and is resigned as Route 2 although Route 7 is never erotically part of Route 2. “Quite a price to pay for a palette. But I heard Munch’s just went for $750,000 at Sotheby’s in London.” “I heard that too. I think he used a color like oxblood when he painted The Scream. I’m in better shape.”

Night was and they swayed into it: a pair of scissors, of sails turning only into themselves more other than become. It is often five o’clock. Her husband has contracted not to speak of her and she has forgotten where to go. Where does everyone go?