Very Long Marriage at Bedtime
I had somehow not remembered
that any number times zero is zero.
David said, think of it this way,
20 zeros are nothing. We were in bed,
teeth cleaned, night guards ready
on the bedside tables. His three pillows
stacked behind his head, my five arranged like a boat
to cradle my back, an almost orange
moon penetrating our window through
smoky darkness like a blaze about to leap
across an expanse of pine forest. How
did this happen? All these years together
compressed into this moment of repeating
moments, so many of them indistinguishable;
so few of them recallable. What does dividing
any number by zero do to that number?
This is sort of fascinating, he says, that you
don’t remember any of this. He rolls
toward me, glides his hands around my hips.
His breath is minty, the skin on his face, flushed.
You’re cute, he says, what else
don’t you remember?
I remember running into you
at the Albuquerque airport, honey,
I say, after not seeing you for so many years.
You wore black jeans and a black tee shirt,
a black belt with a sliver buckle, black
Dr. Martens; I looked at you, your jet-black hair,
and somehow I saw that we were about to combine
sorrows and joys into the terrifying equation
of two people equaling one home. I remember
being panicked, my heart leaping into an abyss,
then sinking to my stomach as I watched
what was to become the rest of my life
glide his luggage off the carrousel. I remember
every minute of each labor, each delivery
for both children, and how going into the birthing
room for the second time, I remembered:
pay attention as the baby exits, that final
wet sliding out of me. I remembered
to pause for one of the swiftest moments
in my life, a whole new warm body
joining the living.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Not One; Not Two
The foothills thrive with wild daisies and the warm soapy smell of Apache plume. A red ant with a missing back leg pushes a tip of dry grass three times its size along the dirt trail, arriving at a small branch where it cannot push the parcel further. I lift the branch, and the ant resumes its task. I pass an enormous anthill teeming with movement. Someone has placed a plastic straw in an opening and the ants tunnel out, landing in a heap on top of each other. In the windy canyon below, a pair of white throated swifts mate mid-air. Their eggs will hatch in a nest of twigs and moss glued to a rocky cliff with their saliva, which ants will climb to lick. On the patio yesterday, I watched a burly carpenter ant get trapped in a web a spider was actively weaving, then work its way out to attack the spider. The insects wrestled on the concrete until the ant had the final swipe and marched off, leaving the spider stunned. An hour later, on my return through the foothills, there is the same red ant with the same piece of dried grass heading toward one of the openings in the big mound. Several from its colony hurry to meet it, and from this ant, two workers take the grass tip, carry it in front of their heads into the nest, while others investigate with their antennae, the space of the ant’s missing leg.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Negativity Bias
We are wired
to expect things will go wrong —
and when they do, to remember them
more vividly than all the beautiful fragments of our lives.
We pretend that worry might predict an outcome.
I place my hands evenly on the table
fan the phalanges,
listen to the whirl of a buzz saw cutting through planks
in the neighbor’s driveway below.
I seek evidence to confirm what I believe —
who would expect wild chickens on a Florida cay
or that while I was looking one way
a leashed dog would leap across the sidewalk and sink its teeth
into my daughter’s thigh?
From what I imagine, the sea will continue its ascent,
still I want, so badly, to hold things in place.
I walk past a man on Elizabeth Street
wearing a FUCK LETTUCE tee-shirt,
the U an applique of a ribeye —
someone went to a lot of trouble to get this just so —
to fit the steak into place like the slats of a veranda.
Earlier there was the buoyant chatter of wild chickens
mating under the creaking eaves of tin roofs,
rainwater from the gutters rolling off their backs.
Like worry, chickens pluck and pluck at indigestibles.
I squeeze my right wrist with my left hand,
the ulna pops —
a sharp ache hurries into my upper trapezius.
This is the evidence I am looking for.