55 Marriage poems

You keep me waiting in a truck with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch, while you piss against the south side of a tree. Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight. That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows and the seat, one fake leather thigh, pressed close to mine is cold. I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago, but get inside me, start the engine; you’ll have the strength, the will to move. I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half. Come on, baby, lay me down on my back. Pretend you don’t owe me a thing and maybe we’ll roll out of here, leaving the past stacked up behind us; old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.

The older we get the stranger my husband becomes, and the less certain I am that I know him. We used to lie eye to eye, breathing together in the immensity of each moment. Lithe and starry-eyed, we could leap fences even with babies on our backs. His eyes still dream off toward something in the distance I can't see; but now he gazes more zealously, and leaps into battle with a more certain voice over politics, religion, or art, and some old friends won't come to dinner. The molecules of our bodies spiral off into the stars on winds of change and chance, as we welcome the unknown, the incalculable, the spirit and heart of everything we named and knew so well— and never truly named, or knew, but only loved, at last.

The city humid, the church rusty and Baroque, and the directions appalling, the Miami sky turned gray as a blanket, and soon tropical rain was falling; the priest repeatedly invoked the Beast in View, as if he were stalling; and in the back a few ushers whipped out their cell phones and started calling. What of the palm scrub, through which mildewed creatures came crawling, or the two cousins from Chicago, who at the reception couldn't stop brawling? All weddings are madness, and except for the sherbet-hued bridesmaids not even a little enthralling. But the stooped and aged, what in their moth-eaten hours were they recalling? Some first nervous kiss, perhaps, the razor of a touch, and all that "Baby Doll"-ing; then the mortgage in Opa-Locka, nine months of waiting, and half a life of squalling.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize prize Value thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East the East East Indies, southeast Asia, including India; the English East India Company began in 1600. doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, My ... rivers cannot quench Compare the Song of Solomon: “Muche water can not quenche love, nether can the floods drowne it." (Geneva Bible) Also, quench could mean to satisfy. Nor ought ought Anything but love from thee give recompense recompense Return payment; reward . Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold manifold In abundance , I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persever persever Both to continue steadfastly, and in the Theological sense to remain in a state of grace. An earlier spelling of the word “persevere.” , That when we live no more, we may live ever.

And does the heart grow old? You know In the indiscriminate green Of summer or in earliest snow A landscape is another scene, Inchoate and anonymous, And every rock and bush and drift As our affections alter us Will alter with the season’s shift. So love by love we come at last, As through the exclusions of a rhyme, Or the exactions of a past, To the simplicity of time, The antiquity of grace, where yet We live in terror and delight With love as quiet as regret And love like anger in the night.

Look at their faces. You know it all. They married the week he left for the war. Both are gentle, intelligent people, as all four of their parents were. They’ve never talked about much except the children. They love each other but never wondered why they married or had the kids or stayed together. It wasn’t because they knew the answers. They had never heard the questions that twisted through the jokes to come of Moses and the Ten Suggestions. They paid their debts and never doubted God rewarded faith and virtue or when you got out of line had big and little ways to hurt you. People walked alone in parks. Children slept in their yards at night. Most every man had a paying job, and black was black and white was white. Would you go back? Say that you can, that all it takes is a wave and a wink and there you are. So what do you do? The question is crueler than you think.

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.

A bride and a groom sitting in an open buggy in the rain, holding hands but not looking at each other, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the marriage to begin, embarrassed by the rain, the effect of the rain on the bridal veil, the wet horse with his mane in his eyes, the rain cold as the sea, the sea deep as love, big drops of rain falling on the leather seat, the rain beaded on a rose pinned to the groom’s lapel, the rain on the bride’s bouquet, on the baby’s breath there, the sound of the rain hitting the driver’s top hat, the rain shining like satin on the black street, on the tips of patent leather shoes, Hokusai’s father who polished mirrors for a living, Hokusai’s father watching the sky for clouds, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing rain over a bridge and over the people crossing the bridge, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing the rain for hours, Hokusai’s father rubbing a mirror, the rain cold as the sea, the sea cold as love, the sea swelling to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.

I Every day it is the same. He comes home. He tells her about it. As he speaks, his breath condenses in front of his face. She goes about her business; every now and then she looks over. She doesn’t hear his voice. She sees the soft fog that continues to form a halo. She knows he is still talking about that place. He never tires of it like she does. Only on summer days when the air is hot and moisture is still a long time in coming, she asks him to tell her about that place. She sits facing him. Waiting for the first vocalic, non-stops, the push of air from his lips. He tells her of the place where clouds are formed. The cool dampness of his voice is rich. Even on a dry June day her face beads with wetness as he talks directly to her. Each aspirated sound a gentle burst of coolness. “Tell me again, tell me again,” she teases. If he knew she only wanted relief from the heat and not the story, he would stop talking. He begins, “The first time I saw the place where clouds are formed was from the window of a train . . .” Another time was in a mirage in the heat outside Tucson. Once he thought he saw it in the dry light of stars. The place he remembers best was when he saw it in the eyes of a woman he spoke to. When he first noticed it, she hid it by lowering her gaze. Soon she let him look freely. There were times when she opened her eyes wide, allowing an unobscured view. Sometimes he saw her eyes smolder with dryness on a summer day. Other times she was rich with moisture. Clouds came in succession. The earth’s shadows muted. “You know the forty days and forty nights? I was there. I’ll be there when it happens again,” she said with a slight smile. Like a child, he rushed to look into her eyes at every opportunity. If he could, he would hang on her eye socket, peering inside, marveling at her displays. II An unusually cold December day right around Christmas; clouds, mist find solace in the canyons of the Santa Catalina Mountains. White moisture quietly moving amid the cactus. Truly, clouds, wind, and rain are the few elements that can touch the saguaro from head to foot. Oblivious of spines, needles. Rubbery hide surrounded, soothed by elements. Contact triggers stored heat of remembered summers. Moisture beads roll forward, unstoppable. From the city below we see mist rising, mist rising. III We sit close in the cab of the truck. The weather is cold, wet outside. Too messy to stand in waiting for a school bus. My father’s truck is warm inside, having been at work since four a.m. The sound of the engine is soothing, heater working to capacity. Inside the cab we are silent. We don’t need language. We listen to the regular hum of the engine, rhythm of the windshield wipers, soft rain on the hood. Aware of the cold air surrounding our temporary shelter. We look out over the fields where fog clings to the soil. Every now and then with the back of his gloved hand he wipes the windshield. “Is it coming yet?” The three of us sit quietly, breathing clouds. Clouds condense as they contact the coolness of the windows. My father appears to breathe air with temperature in balance. He forms no clouds. He watches us. We continue to breathe gray, soft mist, waiting for the school bus.

How well she has worn the wooden evangelist of the mind I wrought in her. He is fraught as Angel Clare With honesty, with his latchet Worthy of her. When I am gone she will put him on the fire As if he’d condemned her.