Wedded, at Last, to the Idea of Weeds
Rosanne Singer
Sunny days I pruned words from your list of favorites.
Bed sheets screened my fantasies of someone else.
I held up a picture, This is what I want our house
to look like. Spare beauty you couldn’t do. Excising
was my exercise. One evening you left me home sick
with the flu. You spread the map and went there.
That time you didn’t want to stay married I said
I wish you were dead. In my nightmares you played
the brick wall, I acted Humpty Dumpty. You planted
tomatoes, sprawling beds of uncontested ground.
Years plumped us, watered the wither. Words overran
their borders. A tornado carried off the roof,
records drowned. We held hands under the gape,
relocated our hurt. We watched a coffin lowered
into the ground, threw fists of dirt. In the rain
you steadied more than half the umbrella
over my head. We conjugated the same verb.
I do, he does, we did.
