Confrontation
She said, “I will follow you anywhere,
across the cement and ashy tumbleweed to Antarctica, if you want it!”
Husband, curled by the floor like a shell, a small whorl in a child’s ear,
spat between his knees and stood up.
Husband’s eyes and mouth were red and spoke of many hot dusks
first in college then with fish in the sea
and tiny boys and trumpets in the gritty evening air.
He spat again.
She, mother and Wife, felt the loss, that spiral
go inside and it poisoned and bedazzled her.
She heard the ocean and almost stumbled back to us,
us, the hapless ring surrounding.
Us, a shocked and cooing crowd
but lost. She spun like a top and disappeared.
Gone from us, she went out to meet the highball jungle where
every molecule burst zaftig
and purple blooming poured liquor
scent and helpless
coca. She met her bottom on a bullet train but
Bill was my good friend. I watched her
as she lit her candle, got her book.
(She was proud when she got it, the first time ‘proud’ entered the picture.
I saw the little smile play between her lips
and eye, “Thirty days, not bad?” she whispered.)
I took markers from her little son and made a chip out of
old red construction paper. It was enough I hope,
because I couldn’t find a place to take us,
not on that particular night, that particular night
that particular night the Husband flew away.
The particular night the Husband flew away
we sank into it—the land of milk and honey and
swollen ducts that made her into another woman,
one without her grace and soft smell. The night sank around us
wet wool on a heifer though
we didn’t get up, we sank lower into that question:
Where and When and How much? Especially Where
now that morning came and washed us out,
comically bright.
Husband came, he came back with Charleton Heston and a chariot,
ready to burn the sky, ignite that other man, and
cold now, my stomach turned. I realized the very great dark
of his night compared with ours—
a warm circle, our little bitterness and
overwhelming stinging eyes, rinsed-off cheeks.
She, a Wife again
frenetic now the shouting started, called us back from nascent memory.
Flame, a woman’s breast, fleshy shame—we all felt it, shame like the curled shell, the child’s ear.