26 April 2005

A Portrait of the Artist as a Failed Husband


For the poems that will remain unwritten, for our children who will remain unborn, for the boundless sea of future happiness that will remain unsailed, I write this.

Though we lived as husband and wife, she alone lived in my heart until she rent and flayed her way out, pulling the ragged meat behind her.

I pour alcohol in the hole she left, but its astringency only doubles the sting. This besotted shambles shall never offend her sight, however; she recedes into a grainy smear of memories.

Every divorce decree is a cenotaph.

Oh, how I cherished the secret hope that I would die before her, so I could seek God's permission to speed to her on angel's wings, and she could . . . maybe . . . possibly . . . behold me magnificent, enrobed in Glory, as I took up sword and shield to beat a tranquil path through Chance to her final day when I would sweep her Heavenward to dissolve with her into The Greater Mind -- we the commingled smoke of two extinguished fires.

But this will never be; her love died before I could. Thus I shrink in Faith. I listen for snatches of joy with a tone-deaf ear, but miracles find not me.

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