guff

 

 

Forty-six, he was diagnosed one week

and gone the next—leaving everything to her.

 

She’d thought their life ridiculous—

she in Boston, he in St. Paul,

 

marriage a thought never mentioned,

the possibility of conception

 

put off until put off again,

the every-weekend stay

 

become the monthly flights,

vacations lost to too ambitious deadlines,

 

to family crises, to deaths.

And now their life lost to his death.

 

But their arrangement had endured.

For him—well, he’d joke he simply

 

liked her mind and needed her body.

She’d smiled at that.  And she’d liked

 

the responsibility of doing his repairs

first in his apartment and then

 

in his house—the trickling toilet,

the torn screen door, the loose doorknob . . . .

 

She’d liked—actually loved—

that day she couldn’t coax him

 

to ride along to the hardware store.

How she had enjoyed his excuse

 

that he was a man who couldn’t go

anywhere near to buying

 

a hammer and chisel

for fear he’d be drawn     

 

into museums with statues

by the compulsion—vestigial

 

in all but the rare few—

to chip off all those stony noses.

 

Implausible, ludicrous

to have lived with such guff

 

now that she has everything to sell,

now that she no longer has their life,

 

now that he can no longer hold the ladder

and make her laugh to its wobble

 

while she cleans the eaves.

William Aarnes

Barnwood poetry magazine