Written by Sue Goyette, based off of Jack Gilbert’s poem “Divorce”.
Imagine waking up and hearing crying,
that quiet sob of despair and rushing through
the house, then remembering. Looking out
the window to see only moonlight and concrete.
Imagine his hand and his paper, later. He’s at his desk,
the whole house behind him, looking over his shoulder,
the door frames, the radiators. Imagine in the middle
of an empty house, the haunting of that quiet despair,
her name like a newly-winged insect searching
for light and some kind of heat, fluttering near his mouth,
the memory of a kiss he still can taste. Imagine
the details of his loss as he shifts through the rubble
of marriage for a poem, something he can manage
to bury again in four lines, bury or somehow illuminate. Imagine him
at his desk choosing where to end the line, after crying,
he decides, after house. Where else could it have ended?
If he were an architect, he would sketch a small cabin
with high ceilings well suited for the acoustics of the low sounds
of sorrow that waft sometimes like smoke. If he were a teacher
with a grade ten class in front of him, he would try reading
a love sonnet out loud, stopping at the word true, his heart groaning
under the weight of it, breaking, a little shift in his chest. He’d conduct
all trains home, make the soupe du jour a good chicken noodle to soothe
the tired shoulders of hunched regret, he would only sign out books
with long indexes and black and white photographs and deliver post cards
from tropical islands, throwing the heating bills down the sewer.
He would agree to the construction of a new bridge, cleaning up
the harbour, expanding the city, but he is a poet who sits up in the middle
of the night, thinking he heard her cry. He gets up, looks out
the window and then remembers that she has left and left so hard; the moon,
the concrete coaxing each other out. He sits down at his desk, chooses a pen
and slowly writes Divorce at the top of the long blank page of all that is left.
