First Husband

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Standing on the stoop, watching my husband walk to his car,
a heaviness comes over me like the black rubber of old tires.
Working for days without break, his weariness wraps around our lives,
and guilt again rises like heat off pavement, stifling my breath.
Vision blackened, I fritter away this season trying to write,
one slow word after another,
and talk to the neighbors who live on hope’s long, thin road,
in a house they don’t own and don’t like.
She asks him, “Will you feed the dogs?”
And he, although unemployed and home all day,
looks away, says, “No, I’ve got a lot to do today.” I just pretend
he said something normal, but swallow hard,
wondering why she still does his laundry.
Later, interrupted by a call, I lie down, phone cupped to ear
listen to words as my day flows by,
stare into a sky without depth or breath,
try to keep the conversation from stretching out,
rambling on and on, a road without end.
I want to cry as my husband drives away in his 88 Mazda,
to a job he hates. How do I live with myself, I wonder, yet I do.
This summer, while I wait to go back to school,
I work on our house that has eaten up our lives.
A fixer, it is called, on a crowded little lot in the city that stretches on for hours
where the sound of the earth, the slow turning,
breathing in and out of the globe is gone.
I dream about going back to the country, where we can breathe deeply
and not hear the neighbors blowing their noses ten yards away,
the country I escaped with its farmers and hunters
of deer and just about any other small animal,
who didn’t give a damn about any life that wasn’t their own.
I long for a walk down a road that winds through the woods,
the play of shadow and light on long empty spaces.
I long to move away from the crowding in of other lives,
from the sex that I know my neighbors never have,
how if he were to reach out and touch her with tenderness
she, so unused to the act, would stiffen,
And he, not knowing his gesture was a love of sorts and worth repeating,
would feel the rejection, pull back, and dream of the eroticism of pinups,
not reaching out again for a number of months or years.
From our stucco house, which is asking more of us than we ever knew possible,
I watch their lives and am thankful, grateful, for the tenderness,
the soft touch of lips that we shared,
even as he was walking out the door to his car
to drive the tired drive to work
and I am released to myself for the rest of the day.
Originally posted on Instagram @Loves_Cauldron