I will read Stag’s Leap again and again until
it stops making sense to my heart, is not my problem anymore.
My mother never told me the story of how she lost
her first husband, much less the second
but I have all these ideas in my head of how she could leave
dad from poetry books like yours,
Sharon Olds. It is what I picked up when my
sunrise split into two blades of grass the wind would carry across
the states, thinking a man I loved could disappear
any time – forget how I picked barbed wire from his chest and
not in the way an ocean forgets it has waves.
Not comfortably. I read your
poems when the world looked like it was made of granola,
eroding from the inside out, I read
Stag’s Leap again and again when he said, no, we do not talk
about her, but it was too quiet not to. I wanted to
talk about things that there are not terms for.
Only so many words one
can say of their memories and feelings because to no one else
are they real – he does not know that the last time I felt
okay with him it was when I fled
his boarding station, smoothing my skirt down
so the train’s breeze wouldn’t touch me. On that day, I wanted
nothing but him to touch me ever again
and there he went, south, leaving with mockingbirds. I
would have waved had I known we were on
a countdown, in the final silent moment of our relationship.
I always knew the hour we last had ***, since Stag’s Leap I now
ask why it is that way. No, we don’t talk about her
but I wonder if ******* a married person still counts as
premarital *** and if I can mourn a man even when he’s right here.