The Marriage Plot

Though, if—

I might say he was quite

the 18th century. En règle, decorous in daily

bow ties. Flashing wit.

That pleasurable pain

of waking at dawn

to scrub, again, the gutters. His prized

laser level in the annual

Righting of the Frames.

Myself—more drinking, more

19th. Long-winded, a little

dull in my vast catalog of woe.

Thoroughly

bourgeois. I mean, sherry muddied

in a crystal decanter. What can you

expect? We knew each other first

in a canopy bed,

in a close room

in an amber state of light,

still thrilled by the subjunctive.

It was important that we oxidize,

not age. Seduced

by private fantasies, I passed out, one evening,

in grandmother’s furs

reeking, still, of smoke.

~

It seemed to me the greatest risk

was to become too legible.

Can I say I was a pauper of love? A long moor

of sorrow? I am not coy

nor slight.

The best image for which

I strove was equine. Regal.

Sturdy. My main mistake, I found,

in the new era—

how easily I turned

plinth and pedestal. Bovine.

My habitual mood

of humiliation,

self-doubt, forlorn depression,

fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire—

Unpacking, again,

his heavy books.

~

We were reared

on Wharton and Brontë, on

Waugh, we found,

one afternoon,

rooting through our pasts

to find some common

ground. Whited

out, aspirational toward

the brooch-filled life.

Something that should

have rotted centuries ago still

writhing in us.

We knew what hid

behind marble fountains,

box seats for Faust,

what lingered in our entwined,

fictional foundations.

~

We can fall for the pathos

of the orphan, for the minor

catastrophes of the dashing rake,

the governess at the country estate

writing epistles

amongst the saxifrage of Sussex.

We can avoid the advances

at the Summer House,

delay a little longer

the central event. We can

take it slow, page by page, count

the dowagers and deathbeds,

waistcoats and hearths.

Our gentleness waning,

we can smash a glass or two

on a Tuesday, unwind some

old wound.

~

One discovers,

one lies.

The house we bought

vacant for a decade, used for storage—

an entire room of coats!—

after a local darling’s

long courtship with a man

a block away was signed legitimate

by the state.

No children

to divvy up the chinoiserie armoire,

the Wedgwood dinner set

with scenic takes of Yale,

the baby grand,

the neighbors pored over

their worldly, posthumous possessions

in a trio of estate sales.

The realtor staged

my office.

Which would remind him,

each time he entered

with a cooling cup of tea

how I inherited

not only a handmade Oriental rug

and a caviar spoon carved

from mother of pearl, but

a selfishness

that manifested mostly

in contraction. Who will take

all we’ll leave behind, all our

little things?

~

On the “Romantic Danube”

river cruise my mother booked

for her and me a month before

my wedding, I watched her dance

with a stranger

to a halting “Blue Moon”

broadcast live to our stateroom.

The sunset

having annulled itself

hours before, somewhere between

Krems and Vienna, it seemed

we were floating in deep, dark space.

From my single bed

I saw her turn

her face from his to laugh, shyly,

at his request for another song.

She left to refresh her drink

and, in this private showing,

this sitcom spinoff of

My Life, I tried to conjure

a scene that never was—

a waltz, a foxtrot, some slow

swaying between parents

in a dimming room.

The closest I got

(here she returns

to the silver-haired man, here

they clink highballs

and he takes her hand

while the pianist limps

into another obvious tune)

was her catching my father

as he fell

from the hospital cot

in our living room. How she scooped

him up under the armpits

in an effortful embrace,

where he stopped living.

~

We can imagine ourselves

an American epic, Copland

booming at sunrise after a battle in which

we were especially savage.

Like a new nation

we can discard shame.

We can walk to the grass tennis courts and wave,

in a summer storm,

our rackets.

As if to tempt

lightning, or as if we

were beating out the moths

from exotic carpets

in a long novel

that half the population

doesn’t have the window-light

to read.