after Jorie Gram's "The Marriage"

after Jorie Graham’s “The

Marriage”

I’m taking the ashes/

 from the woodstove out

when I think

I step on something

in the dark

when I hear

two floorboards rub

together like always

when it feels

soft and the bulge

reminds me

(it does, sunk

stomach,

of the mice

under my feet

that time,

I think I saw

their breath

before I saw

their small

break-open-seed

hull teeth)

when I have to

say again:  it was

dark and cold

when walking back

to the light is

three steps away

when before pulling

the switch

I don’t want to know

when I know

the floor is bare

always squeaks there

when it’s Orion

all along

I was after

over the neighbor’s

foreclosed

house

when I’m prompted

to wonder on the edge

of forty seven

(maybe I did it

yesterday too,

to think of my first

husband how

in the poem

the poet talks

about a woman’s

marriage

night and the groom’s

no place to be

found I wander off too

on my own

knowing it

myself.

when there are

no mice or ever

were, not there

when the prince

skedaddled--hat

and tackle

when after the fact

he’s not a prince at all

it was the wrong breath

when undoing (she was

taking out the ashes

the poet)

(I’ve done that too)

when voices vanish

and the hands that sign

the bottom line--

when I’m out

of my mind on that

wedding night

in Colorado and he’s

beside me wiping up

laughing--his strategic catastrophe

when ass blood...there is nothing
as black that  I swab and see

shades for days and days

didn’t it all begin, all this

with two mice

a charm?

a turn over this won’t hurt

at all?  Didn’t it start

at Orion’s belt?  Is

he taking out

his sword

or putting it back

in? 

If I knew you in advance...

But I didn't.  You.  And me

the bride

you and me mice.

Once the step’s down

the bones are broke.

And they are
unmendable.