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Edited on Mon Oct-22-07 10:57 AM by BlueIris
"Equation"
—for B
We've been wrong about X. We think X erases.
The ex-marine, expected to forget. The ex-wife
gone, we say, forever. But we end up married to her,
all of us, unasked.
Like a brand on a steer's flank
X is indelible,
though the auburn hide tufts
through the spaces.
Don't let the brand's lines cross
in too many places,
or the skin will fester.
Keep it simple: Lazy A. DW.
You wouldn't lay an X over an O.
Everywhere the legs of the X cross the rim
of the circle,
the brown would be too deep.
You can always spot a changed brand,
a suspicious R with a lower loop:
the misshapen B.
No letter crosses out. Everything frames,
the past always behind cross hairs,
twice bisected,
four small wedges
inedible.
1.
Our bodies, which have no memory of time,
still lie on a single bed,
deforming to fit.
The child's puzzle of hollows and shapes,
chin and shoulder, leg over thigh.
Given all the space in the world,
we would have slept folded over each other,
a knot, we thought, insoluble.
2.
The parents we might have been,
the girl who did not get born,
the baby, Sarah—whom we would have choked
with our hunger.
She is probably happier with some other family,
now entering Montessori school,
now tested for dyslexia.
Still, her elfin face,
your family's lined eyes
look at me,
the shadow of all I refused.
3.
X needs a name to cling to.
I never met your ex-uncle Max, disowned
after he left your mother's sister,
whom I can't call anything.
Without law, I have no names
for your family.
I say, "my ex's mother,"
tracing her lineage through you.
I had my own line to her.
She called herself
my "outlaw mother."
It was the mother that mattered,
not the law.
4.
X is a stand-in
for everything: not just for you,
whom I call my ex-, unmodified, never named
so not not married.
My ex-house, where we huddled together like
refugees, resting
in transit,
my ex-neighborhood, where only the ocean's pulse
held together, the texture of my ex-days
driving to work with you,
making a Seder,
listening to you sing old Union songs
across Kansas, soundtrack for
your memories.
We are still in the world together,
all of us wobbling on the brink of 40.
The friends we ate dinner with moved East,
taking their whining with them,
the friend I loved when I left you
lives happily ever after, without me.
Frankie, who taught us cribbage,
is dead. Karen, who introduced us,
is dead. We are
forever connected by the deaths of our friends,
which are just the beginning.
Negation is no way out.
Not-x and x-
prints on the same line.
In the center of x
it is black. The break.
The brand's deep burn.
By this sign we are marked,
owned by loss.
To say "ex"
is to say
always.
—Roz Spafford
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