In The Show We’ve Been Watching The Unloved Beautiful

wife is pretty as a wedding cake.

Think Wasp perfection,

Hitchcock’s doomed blondes.

Like them, she knows something’s up,

but this time she’s not snooping,

just “tidying up,” as women

did then, & when she finds

in her unfaithful husband’s robe

pocket a brass key, she knows

at once where it fits. They’re rich

enough for a paneled study, a man’s

mahogany desk—everything

is gendered, this is the early ’60s—

& there she finds his divorce

papers, old photographs, a birth

certificate that says her name

is a lie. & I thought of you, Mother,

& how you were like her,

with my father, just tidying up,

when under his rolled socks

& Ban-Lon shirts you found his cache

of Air Corps discharge papers,

the vain & foolish lies—his rank

Second Lieutenant, not Major,

that he’d been a navigator, not

a bombardier. Grace Kelly’s look-

alike will scream & tear

at her too-handsome husband’s face,

then leave him for the life-raft lover

he’ll slap her over, but you,

Mother, closed that cheap deal

drawer softly, like the door

to a room you were leaving for good,

like the lid to a wind-filled jar.