Afterwards: excerpts on a marriage

Afterwards: 
excerpts on a marriage: 

They stood, their clothes flapping...

             Glass floats covered with...

The bones of seabirds.

At the tide

line ...

                   the ribs of fishes in their millions ...

along the shore as far as the ...

                  isocline of death...one vast salt sepulcher.  

                                                The Road

                                                Cormac McCarthy

the words he’ll never speak keep coming:

a rising/falling bay whose only know is to push to pull

push and pull: the way he, a man went in-

to a woman his wife a woman his wife going into a woman

her lover going into him man going into another man.   

but not like that. ok maybe like that.

maybe a little.  but only because of the salt.

he decides it’s only because of the salt in his sweat.  and maybe

the salt in the wind.

yes maybe,

because wind never stops

talking, not this wind.  he thinks maybe sex can get it to stop

stinging.  after the accident he'd put his mouth against a drain-

spout so green with detritus it was almost suicide.  an ancient

accent, the gurgle of his latent atonement,

a something he’d want to put his mouth against

again and again, the drainpipe draining

down his throat in words and words and words that keep

coming up her spine where he used to be each night

he knew her, his nipple against hers sometimes or from behind

the way he’d sneak up and invite himself

in and she never said no before because maybe

one day he’d be right where he is now and she’d be right

where she is now and no one would

want to touch him. no one.  no one would want

or even care to hear the faint

radio of a word rubbing against another word

and another and then space space       space

as wide as a Dostoyevsky page in the book

about the Inquisitor, as bound as the spine

of that book as generous and needed and consensual as

sex: the words he’d never read never even seen

and certainly never heard.  he watches her mouth

them. she spits

them into the palm of her hand when she kneads

bread, pinches them when she makes tea

when she bakes cakes.  she seasons meat

with them and eats and drinks and throws them

at the tide clock not ever looking at the empty

chair, not needing to,

and some of him having gone out and she after

so many other shes and hes (though never

as good as him and never as ready and caring)

gets ready too, gets ready after all

these years a thin now childless wife

to close her book.