First Marriage
You know how you're going along, getting along, moving through life -- thinking all the while that you are captain of your ship, Destiny? And then, wham!, something comes along to disrupt your course, and the house of cards (to mix metaphors) that was your orderly, ordered life comes tumbling down? And you are left standing there, amid the rubble, wondering, "What happened...?"
The poem below, First Marriage, helps say precisely that; its truth, my truth, scores a bulls-eye in my gut, my head, my heart.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-- Liam Rector
© The University of Chicago Press, 2006
The poem below, First Marriage, helps say precisely that; its truth, my truth, scores a bulls-eye in my gut, my head, my heart.
-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First Marriage
I made it cross country
In a little under three days.
The engine blew out
About a hundred miles north
Of San Francisco, where I'd
Hoped to start living again
With a woman I'd abandoned
Only a few months before.
The reasons I'd left her were
Wincingly obvious
Soon as I got back
To her, and it didn't take long
Before I again left her.
In a few weeks I'd meet
The woman who became
My first wife, the one
With whom I spent
Almost the entirety
Of my twenties. It took
About twenty years
Getting over her, after
We divorced at thirty.
Broke then, I took
A bus cross-country
And was back in the East
By Christmas, thinking it
Would take three years maybe
To put this one behind me.
But getting over her
Happened as we were
Both in our third marriages,
Both then with children,
Heading for our fifties.
She came cross-country
To tend to me when I had
Cancer, with a 20% chance
Of recovery. The recovery
From all she had been to me,
Me abiding with her as long
As I did, took place finally
When we, her sitting on my bed
And me lying in it, held hands
And watched ourselves watching
TV, something we'd never quite
Been able to do comfortably
All those years ago. So many
Things turn this way over time,
So much tenderness and memory,
Problems not to be solved
But lived, and I resolved
Right then to start living
Only in this kind of time.
Cancer gave this to me: being
Able to sit, comfortably, to get
Over her finally, and to
Get on with the fight to live while
Staying ready to die daily.
I made it cross country
In a little under three days.
The engine blew out
About a hundred miles north
Of San Francisco, where I'd
Hoped to start living again
With a woman I'd abandoned
Only a few months before.
The reasons I'd left her were
Wincingly obvious
Soon as I got back
To her, and it didn't take long
Before I again left her.
In a few weeks I'd meet
The woman who became
My first wife, the one
With whom I spent
Almost the entirety
Of my twenties. It took
About twenty years
Getting over her, after
We divorced at thirty.
Broke then, I took
A bus cross-country
And was back in the East
By Christmas, thinking it
Would take three years maybe
To put this one behind me.
But getting over her
Happened as we were
Both in our third marriages,
Both then with children,
Heading for our fifties.
She came cross-country
To tend to me when I had
Cancer, with a 20% chance
Of recovery. The recovery
From all she had been to me,
Me abiding with her as long
As I did, took place finally
When we, her sitting on my bed
And me lying in it, held hands
And watched ourselves watching
TV, something we'd never quite
Been able to do comfortably
All those years ago. So many
Things turn this way over time,
So much tenderness and memory,
Problems not to be solved
But lived, and I resolved
Right then to start living
Only in this kind of time.
Cancer gave this to me: being
Able to sit, comfortably, to get
Over her finally, and to
Get on with the fight to live while
Staying ready to die daily.
-- Liam Rector
© The University of Chicago Press, 2006
Labels: Humanities, Life Lessons, Poetry
posted by David M Gordon | 4:54 AM
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