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Four Sonnets #1
“I never loved you as much as I loved X.” How strange to hear the words through her voice now. X marks the spot where I stood once. Allow the formula to grow, Y marks his sex, and Z would be the woman after me. Subtracting Y (he left her, pled divorce) leaves unknowns when we solve for Love’s recourse. Recalculate to find the sum of Z? I wanted to think she got the better deal: an opened door on the whiff of my recipes redefined by her taste. She’d stride in, pleased. I would have fed my jealousy anything to keep it alive and supple, a living shield. “Do you know he’s still wearing his wedding ring?”
#2
She knows he’s still wearing his. The wedding ring I picture first (and last) is the one I knew left glittering with the keys in the living room, the ones that we’d forgotten what they were to. But it’s her ring she means. Could love still bring him back? Her unvoiced vertigo: Why cling to what he said was nothing all along? “He still has yours, you know. In his top drawer with receipts from your honeymoon. What’s he keep them for?” I lie, “I don’t know. Do you think that’s wrong?” What can you do with a past love’s wedding band but save it as a dark glass for reflection? — as long as he doesn’t put it on his hand. “What’s he going to do, start a collection?”
#3
What is he going to do? Start a collection of rings and ex-wives, each with a velvet box tucked just out of reach? Or, will he outfox himself, trapping his whole heart for the next one? His heart the quarry, that’s our metaphor though he would say he never ran from the chase: Whoso list to hunt, or eyebrows raise across a roomful of people or a davenport — he knew the subtle flash of a snowy tail in the underbrush, could follow, track, or trail. To train in patience all adolescence, then find and catch, one shy foot barely in the blind! There’s no sport, no story, in such ease. Why not let her glide into that stand of trees?
#4
“Why not let her glide into that stand of trees?” He might have said. He might have lain in wait all day, all night, a week, month, ending in pleas to Aphrodite. Whatever salted bait he set, it was of course too late. She flushed in another glade beyond all reprimand. So we surmise, heads crooked to our phones. I fuss with bean sprouts, turn the tofu in my pan just as our speculations start to hone in toward that awkward fear: that our regrets are common, bland as dust. We splash in secrets like marinade to waken the tongue. Are you as afraid as I am of the dial tone? “Did he accuse you of being lesbian too?”
[These sonnets originally appeared in Kathrine's book of poems
The Paragon
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