The Violent Legacy of Household Monogamy
Like the ocean of highway whose monoxide breeze
beats the blinds. Like a vestige of something
the last tenants left behind: orphaned
wind-chimes,
potted plants, the cat that came with the place
ticking softly as a gas meter. It pads around
us
while we try, with band-aids and conflicted allen keys,
to assemble the furniture whose sketchy directions
implicate every piece despite the leftover bits
that surround us like the clipped wings of houseflies.
The story I prefer to change-of-address is how a vehicle
took me to a place filled with marzipan doll-fruit
and French appliances: a mistress concealer, a
pants-presser,
a tomato-juice gradient. Take me to your leader, I insisted,
and the rent-a-cop waved his hands at the entire development,
had a voice like a gravel driveway in an attached house
that crunched with each bounce of the neighbor kid’s
basketball, as if he didn’t know about the superior qualities
of asphalt. Maybe he really didn’t. Every time I mimic
the security guard’s pitch, your ears twitch and blister
with joy like I’m performing a magic act that skips
the disappearing objects and sawed halves in favor
of liberating doves from flowers and sticks and hats.
You relocate moths trapped in the house—
call each one Buddy, cup its fluttering in your
hands
with assurances you’ll release it past the screen door.
Your fragile hand-cages predict the plane-catching dreams,
the packing dreams, the bouquets of foxglove and hydrangea
cropping up on my pillow like the locusts in the newspaper
that plagued a Bangladeshi highway, blinding drivers
until dawn when the swarm returned to its agreeable place
and the motorists resumed their journeys. (Home?)
When the angels dressed as moths and doves and locusts
at last decide to blow their trumpets for us, to bless this house,
proximity is a problem. I wash their loudness
down the drain,
then remember the song about the spider scaling its way back up.
I don’t care if we can’t hear them, even faintly.
I don’t care
if we can’t cradle what has been held always, everywhere
by everybody. I mesh your bandaged fingers
with mine.
Originally
appeared in American Poetry Review.
.