House/Home
I am writing you a poem about marriage,
though I always said the topic
was not worthy of the form.
It hasn't been kind to me,
so forgive me,
with your hands and feet gripping the rungs
climbing in or out--
I can never tell the difference.
I should probably write a love poem
since I'm better at that,
and the world devours them.
But I am not in the marketing business,
and besides,
that is the story deferred.
Love is not the tie that binds.
It does more insidious work.
It searches out the knot between stomach and heart
that didn't know itself.
It fingers the spot gently,
retreats,
repeats,
until the whole system gives way.
But I said I was not going to write about love.
I am writing about surrender,
and its many opposites.
I confess I have been tendered.
My mind turns over all that means.
I have been bought
and sold.
I have been made edible.
Have been held,
have held.
This is not a poem about love--
yours, mine, or ours.
Don't read between the lines.
The houses we build with our hands and promises
consume us.
I'm not judging.
I want to be consumed, too.
By fire,
by the work of my unskilled hands,
by your mouth like the still surface of a lake
betraying its bottomlessness.
I knew what I was saying
on that sun-dappled day,
dolphins leaping
and the chorus of gathered minds
almost audibly stifling the collective "why?"
I knew what I was saying,
covered in beads the color of the sand
that stretched to forever outside the window.
I knew what I was saying.
But there was still a sledgehammer in the garage
that I swore was not on the registry.
He and I took off layer after thirty-year-old layer of wallpaper,
an encyclopedia of someone else's fresh starts.
We tore out yellowed carpet,
staples digging into my fingers,
to reveal the house's true past and future.
Wood floors and historically accurate paint
painstakingly chosen from indistinguishable color chips.
I, who had never sown, sewed curtains
for the only room I ever loved,
the one that let in so much light
that my newborn son squinted against it,
the one where we hosted children's birthday parties
with drunk, belligerent relatives.
The one where I hid,
but the lock on that door never worked anyway.
I keep trying to remember
what it was Maya Angelou wrote
about the memory of walls,
how our housed lives drip from them.
But it doesn't matter.
This is not a love poem.
Why do I have to keep saying that?
This is the poem where I declare that
I will never marry again.
I will write you a love poem another day,
when I can crack the window
and pretend that home
is not one of those words
that we say over and over again
until it is nonsensical.
I can only speak for myself.
My love will not be housed.
If it comes to that,
it will find a stretch of beach
and watch the waves throw themselves against the rocks,
surrendering a thousand lifetimes
to another's yielding.
