Adam Fieled (editor, Philadelphia, USA): "On A Marriage"
I.
Fish,
fish tank ricocheted through my skull
as I lay on the thin, tough-skinned,
scrappy
grey
couch. What was in the next room stank, unhappy
yokels knowing I’d trespassed past the full
load
I’d dumped on them. They wouldn’t let us
sleep together; Jen slept in a room with
her sister,
as I tossed, poison-brained, through
several blistering
nights
in the Harrisburg ‘burbs— cornfields, husks
staring fish-eyed at the bizarre married
couple.
She was hollowed out around corn, body
doubled.
I need to know if this is real. I need to
know, also,
if
there’s something in you I do not or cannot know,
if
you’re really my wife (whom I love), trusted friend?”
But
I flailed away in Liverpool’s darkness, silence-tied,
& I hadn’t seen or known the inside of
a trailer before,
Jennifer had known little else,
& I hadn’t known this war,
but
force in our bodies engendered a tornado’d sky,
force in our souls lay dormant.
Grandfather clock shone five.
Window showed black husks thrust
upwards, moon alive.
About the way she’d trotted out before me,
emerging
from
a kind of mist, lean, tow-headed, urgent
about preserving roots I hadn’t seen,
something
lascivious
branded us blackly, gradually, as though
I should know all there was to know, like
this
trailer— scarecrow fronted, ragged,
just drips
from
the shower spout, Jen a trailer princess, no
way to see beneath arable land’s surface,
no scheme to pull back a secret temple’s
curtains.
II.
Five
floors up on the elevator: I was too
thin, almost collapsed from humidity
outside,
but
Jennifer, the knowledge of her insides,
held me up, with luggage we carried
through.
Why
the compulsion was there, prodded us
into instant betrayal, I cannot say or
know now—
clothes got piled sloppily, hotly, on
a rug, brown
as
always at the Atherton Hilton, clean, fussed
for breaking, entering, conventioneers,
academics,
now two incredibly horny, moody
adolescents.
We were washed ashore after fucking, over
& over.
No one in history had been so marooned with a
lover.
Every time I touched her, I risked
rousing a monsoon.
Wave
after wave broke, entered. We didn’t exist
except as pistons in a tropical engine.
Glasses of water,
occasional baths, a little TV,
body-boundaries slaughtered,
so
that when we hit the Arts Fest, it didn’t resist.
My brain had spokes spinning the wrong
way, but
she took the Pandora’s Box &
nailed it shut.
I had no yen for anything but to survive.
Nights there
were
like days. We never had leave to figure out where
we were. Tunnels spiraled down & up:
something
heaved,
out in the world. Someone under the bed
seemed to be nudging us; maybe how we’d
been
reduced to carnage. Being in her: what
I was in
was
sheets rumpled, no maid, dementia in the head.
We ate nothing: crackers, occasional food
on College Ave.
Once I spun to McLanahan’s: lines
crazy, bodies mad.
Justice of the Peace be damned, only two
kids on fire
for
each other, from a place not without depth, kissed
by strange fate into each other, hard-wired
to
memorize only two-in-one harmony, could know
or see, as we wrestled only to fall deeper
into space
held together not at all, spiraling
into boundlessness—
fragile,
evanescent, bloody-minded into callousness
against the loveless, timid hordes, not
ready to face
anything but this— we could only be
there, then go—
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