The Way You Said You Wanted/A Divorce

The Way You Said You Wanted

A Divorce

This should have been our travels:

serious, engravable.

                                                Elizabeth Bishop

                                                Over 2,000 Illustrations and

                                                a Complete Concordance 

                                                   It’s only 

at night I see you now and only nights

like last night that strike my face and brain

the way a casually thrown stone may.  Tossed

without thought, it would knock against

my jaw and set it rocking like an old chair

that’s been empty for so long it’s almost

rotting in its corner of the ring.  

                                                   There's an 

acrylic quilt: (you know those squares women 

make after supper, after dishes are done, the piles 

and piles of crocheted variegated frames, those soon

enough built they stitch them plain flat to event-

ually fold over the cold knees of the sitter, yes?

It’s the kind of macramé a tongue might touch

the way the soft wet inner cheek grates against

the teeth after the rock is tossed and falls, those

knots gone tough, gone into the trough that all nights 

fall into since you said what you said.

                                                  And the scum 

of pollen spread out to float

mustard yellow (though who knows in this kind of dark).

It is pulled to the bottom, is smudging up with the

others, is shoulders hunched, is this rock I’m talking

about in his pollen cape, the one tossed almost anonymously, 

the one that knocks me back a bit then forward, all stops

gone. 

                                                    Now my days are 

empty of you, thank God.  My teeth, when they meet

secretly, when I mean to think walking bare

foot, are flattening while I am on a path like that, 

sparten steps in the dark; I think: it is no wonder

the moon chooses to rise during the day this time

of year, when I see you out during a night of 

throwing stones, stones you spend your whole

day getting to know, holding them, bringing them

to your nose, closing your eyes--until the casual

cold shrugged shoulder, until the plunk it makes

after it’s tossed, waiting like all the rest for the day

to go down, the way it comes to this

so casually, so nonchalantly after all these

years of absence, after a decade of our vow

and a decade of our silence, thrown into the air

to split-second impact, to shifted jaw, 

                                                     to the bottom

of a trough, the surface disturbed but dismissing

it, closing ranks, loading no weapon

but facing always, the way they came last night

(the rocks) collected all your day, without name

or face but solid enough, always solid enough

to go straight down, knocked on its ass, stunned

too stunned to start, after waking, recovering right

away.