Those Days When Love
Doesn't Workby Nancy Tripp King
Main Street Rag Editor's Select Poetry Series (2004)
ISBN 1-930907-53-2
74 pgs., $11.95
BOUND
Unwise to the ways of time
we follow tradition.I promise to obey.
He promises to cherish;
places a wide tight band
on my third finger.Under that chauvinistic circle
cherish becomes bondage
and obedience begins to strangle,
both cutting deep into the flesh.
MAKESHIFT
I’m a goat born in captivity,
living in a fenced field
on a three-tiered
makeshift mountain,
roof-shaped and rising high—
tar-papered rough—
barbed wire
fencing out the knowledge
that mountain peaks differ.
CEMENT AND RIBBONS
He rotates again,
stateside to stay,
from thirteen long months overseas.
I leave the yellow ribbon
that welcomed him home
still tied tight
to our white country mailbox
lonely at the end of the lane.He settles in like he’s never been gone,
begins to paint our lily-white house
Battleship Gray.
The yellow fades without notice
to the sick color of bruises
just before they disappear
inside to stay.I walk to the highway,
long for the first bus to anywhere,
finger the ribbon, now picked
and frayed and hanging limp
like a satin nightgown used
once too often
in a moon-splintered room.I untie the knot,
drop the ribbon into thorns
tangled around the rotting post
he cemented so it would appear
military straight.
Nancy and Calvin have been married 44 years. Two kids and a grown granddaughter later, Calvin says, “This is not the woman I married.” Nancy answers, “Thank goodness for that.”