Toward the Heliopause

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The Wife


I thought that you had died. Were dead.
So I set off to find a house
for just us two, your wife and child.

I reached a village built on rock.
that faced a surging seething sea
and climbed past jumble to the top,

and found you there alive and flush
opening a door for me.
Come in, you said, Come meet my love.

You led me up a spiral stair
inside a tower made of stone
with slits for light. And it grew dark,

too dark to see your other wife.
But I could hear and feel her breathe.
And so, I said, you’ve a new life.

Then I was taken with the thought
that you had found the place we sought
when you and I shared dreams and talked.

But you – and I should have known
the soul that wanders finds a home –
wordless, returned me to the road.

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Therapy


Each time she rang the bell, I was shaken.
She might have been a witch or an archangel
like your Satan. Two p.m., your hour
of death, she came to find me – one widow

on her list of grieving widows. Her hands
were thick with rings. Strange to me, she wore
ultra-suede trouser suits in pastel
shades. She was tall, old, bony.

I dared not ask about herself but wondered
if she had lost a husband and now found life
in listening to others speak of grief.
She used few words, none I had not heard,

Nor did she ever touch me as if she and I
were human. Yet her method worked.
I served two cups of tea. Then things poured out
that made me see and feel and weep and weep,

This continued through the spring and summer
that first year when I could not bear
to look at sky or see your constant ending.
I began to write these poems then.

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