(seven)

My friend’s husband
won’t let her buy
a $7 dollar wheelbarrow.
Because she already
has two.
Her vocation is
gardening and she
says she needs all three.
I believe her.
Because I know a person
must be allowed to choose
their own tools.

We are talking long distance
in the time we might have
worked, trying to get our
lives on track, trying
to get our lives back.
My first steps to stop
ironing his shirts,
to stop making his lunch.
desparate, nearly ludicrous
in its smallness as an act.

There’s nothing to making
a lunch, I put more effort
into not doing it than
it would take to be done.
I think it was that way
the men sat down and waited
for us to bring them
whatever they might want.
To pour their water,
butter their toast.
It’s a kind of caring
that clutters the mind
so that you can’t see
what your own needs might
be.
Are you thirsty?
Do you need to eat?
Ah a dangerous dillemma
women who end up in somebody’s
keep. I thought it didn’t
matter too much about money,
just is there some or not.
I still think that.
But it gets all tangled up in
can I claim my life.
I make the tuna salad
but refuse to spread it
on the bread.
I slice his carrots
and put them in a bag.
Put an apple on top.
He puts the tuna on
the 7-grain I make a
special trip for
and puts it in a bag
and gets to feel he’s
making his lunch,
has done yet another
thing for me.
The whole plan has
backfired.
By the same standards
I could write myself
a check and call it
earning my own living.

What I was going for
was the freedom to do
some remedial work.
To learn how to take care
of myself. To eat when
I am hungry, to rest
when I am tired,
to allow myself to say
what I need and want.
It’s pathetic how develop-
mentally delayed I am.
And I am not alone, you
may rest assured of that.

He moves her bench that
she has placed in a shady
spot where she wants to
rest. And when she says
why it was there, he does
not put it back.
I am not saying men
are bad, I am saying
this relationship dynamic
will not work.

He leaves town, she has
the energy suddenly
to move the bench back,
to clean up the green house
she has been neglecting,
and time to spare to make
a declaration for her life.
Beginning with giving up making his lunch,
She plans to wait it out
working in her plants,
when he shows up hungry.
To pull her hat brim
down to avoid seeing him
there staring at her.
Waiting. For his lunch.

I am haunted by that wheelbarrow,
and wake up thinking the man
has gone too far.
The impasse that happens
when two people cease to be
dynamic is the worst stillness
there is.

It’s hard to know how much
of it is money.
Having lived my whole adult
life fending for myself –
lately I have reminding myself
of that.
I have decided to stop announcing
that someone else is paying my
bills, as I guiltily do as though
it were tattooed to my face.
The woman who washed Chagall’s
laundry, I’m betting she shielded
him from as much of the life’s
scuttle as she could. Like all
the women with my male poet friends,
it used to piss me off how the guys
got to be adored for what they did,
and the women were put
up with. Her friend who said you
can always tell the women poets
because they have a stain or a safety
pin somewhere. I had forgotten to
recall this sad detail that used to
be so true. Though I just remembered
the other day, those kitchens where I
stood in the doorway, not knowing
whether to go into the room with the
men who were poets or the room where
their women were. Well, of course,
you would come into the room with
the poets he said, but it was not
of course too me.

The women poets were always alone,
the only one I knew who got a husband
felt like a hermit crab in her house,
billed him for everything she did. It seemed so silly.
I always thought if someone else
would just pay the bills, if someone
else would just do anything, any tiny
little thing I would grateful.
Who the hell washed Chagall’s clothes,
did she iron his shirts?
When the men had a calling their women
rallied round them, and sheltered them
from the untidy details of a life.
But for the women – and it has never
changed – they became housewives and could
not hold their heads up at a party,
so they stopped going out.

I always preferred the b oldly candid
like my neighbor who says straight out
are you generating any revenue –
not a damn dime I answer.
I’m goin’ for don’t cost much.
Working on earning my keep,
That’s how we lost our right
to say, I’m too busy to make your
lunch.

I always thought we were to
complete each other by sharing
what we knew, not by fitting
inadequacies together like setting
a sleeve in a shirt, but then
I always thought so much shit
and just look where it’s got me.
knee deep in doo doo and don’t know
how to get out.
I think if I had all the cash in
the world he would still be waiting
for me to pour his water, instead
of being in the kitchen pouring mine
while I peak into the basmati pot.
But I have to get it to be sure.
I did it all to myself. He used
to wash his own shirts, soaking them
in ceramic bowls, and for his supper
opened a can and a bag of chips.
I did the things I knew how to do
to make life nicer, making money
was not one of them.

A woman I used to know always
said she was grateful to her husband
for keeping her alive – or something
like that. I always thought it an
odd, sad thing to say – so, of course, I had to live it.
I felt grateful to be out of that nasty
job, or what had been a nasty job for me.
And thought I’d use the time wisely,
as I pride myself on doing
but everything got so stuck I
could hardly open the drawer where the
work was, could not get down to where
the words lived, could do nothing
but try to describe silence.
Stinging, bitter, rough-edged as
a cat’s tongue to the skin.