The Forms that Choose Us

With thanks to Christopher Smart

I’d like to consider my marriage
For it is a vessel that never poured me out
But contained me. For it has kept me off the streets
And allowed me into the synagogues
For it gave me three children and more blessing
Than money. For it lasted against odds and bad tempers.
For it is bigger than the two small operators
Pushing and pulling like buck saw through tree.
For it has ten hands and ten feet, a hundred toes.
For it has a studious Adam and a fractious Eve.
For it has digested thirty thousand meals
And slept in proximity eleven thousand nights.

I want to consider divorce
Which delivers the subject from the object.
For bringing solitude back to the besieged.
For crafting two wholes out of two halves
For making possible a next love
For the vials of tear as precious as the ambergris of whales
For the temptation to shout divorce at minor altercations
For divorce brought my mother to my father
And their love begot me and for this
I must praise divorce.

And I want to consider solitude
For the celibate man I met on a hillside
His anger turned over and exhumed
For the woman who lives alone and is smiling
No one to blame. For the man who said
It is easier to be spiritual alone and then moved
In with his lover. For solitude, the woman who walks
Out alone into the desert for visions, the man
Who has to drag his reluctant self back from woods
Praise living alone, for the air in the room
When you wake is nothing but God

Praise how out we intersect. The tiny cemetery in
La Puebla with plastic flowers and boney sunsets.
Your children eating at my house, mine at yours.