ending with lines from Tracy K. Smith
A few minutes ago, I was considering again how to ask you to leave.
How when we were watching the TV show, the lead character
advises his friend to just be honest about what you want, and you,
sitting on the couch, blurted out to no one in particular, how meta.
I think of how I haven’t been truthful: you don’t know I was married
before the marriage you know about, that I’ve failed more
than once. I remember how, early on, you turned me over
in the text you sent that was meant for someone else, how I kept
hearing the phrase, there are no accidents, repeating in my head,
how yesterday I watched a bald eagle circle the inlet, retracing
the same orbit, over and over, the shadow moving across the surface
of the water like an eraser on a blackboard, dark above the fish,
until it wasn’t there anymore, and the bird left. You hate things
I like, including birds, poems, half-finished paintings, lipstick,
long stories. When I tell you a story, you spin your finger in the air
to hurry me up, so I’ve stopped speaking about what matters,
like last night when I dreamed an old woman passed me handfuls
of beans and said, here is hopelessness. When I catch myself
in the mirror, I am not without hope. I see my face scored
with silver and remember Judith’s mother’s last words:
shiny things make things come back. The reflection returns me
to a world that measures time in beats, divided up.
It has been five years since I lived alone. In my head, these lines
will tattoo the skin where my breasts used to be: We want
so much, / When perhaps we live best / In the spaces between loves.
–
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing in southern California. Her award-winning poetry books include In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019). She is the faculty editor of MORIA, the national literary magazine of Woodbury University.