They decide finally not to speak
of it, the one blemish in their otherwise
blameless marriage. It happened
...
Long after I married you, I found myself
in his city and heard him call my name.
Each of us amazed, we headed to the café
...
The house felt like the opera,
the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,
but the cast not yet arrived.
...
Southern France, 1945
What young men won't do, my father wondered,
scalpel in hand, his army drabs stained red,
catching his breath beneath his surgeon's mask,
peering again into the body of this boy
he guesses joined up like all the rest:
to prove something. And my father's task
of cutting—cutting through tissue
and bone, using everything he's learned.
War is war, of course. He knows that.
His job: to keep these boys alive,
even the Germans, to cut past
gangrened flesh. Afterwards
the intricate suturing, the mangled
limbs removed from the antiseptic table
by someone else. How he's able
to do this, hour after hour, one body
becoming another, he doesn't know.
He thinks of this now in Brooklyn
walking down Court Street to the barber
past all the specialty shops—cheese wheels
from France, barrels of pickles,
salmon and mussels on racks of ice,
rabbit carcasses, their skins removed,
hanging above displays of liver and chops.
Against his will the smell and the sound
of the saw he always had to use,
the feel of it, and in his arm the ache.
...
A woman is born to this:
sift, measure, mix, roll thin.
She learns the dough until
it folds into her skin and there is
no difference. Much later
she tries to lose it. Makes bets
with herself and wins enough
to keep trying. One day she begins
that long walk in unfamiliar woods.
She means to lose everything
she is. She empties her dark pockets,
dropping enough crumbs
to feed all the men who have ever
touched her or wished.
When she reaches the clearing
she is almost transparent—
so thin
the old woman in the house seizes
only the brother. You know the rest:
She won't escape that oven. She'll eat
the crumbs meant for him, remember
something of his touch, reach
for the sifter and the cup.
...
Andrea Hollander (Budy) (born April 28, 1947 Berlin, Germany) is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 - 2012 (Autumn House Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, FIELD, Five Points, Shenandoah, and Creative Nonfiction. She was raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey, and educated at Boston University and the University of Colorado. From 1991 till 2013, Hollander was writer-in-residence at Lyon College. She married designer/builder Todd Budy, on July 18, 1976, and divorced him on August 16, 2011. They have a son, Brooke. Until their divorce they lived in the Ozark Mountains near Mountain View, Arkansas. Hollander, who reclaimed her maiden name after the divorce, now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing workshops at The Attic Institute for Arts and Letters and at Mountain Writers Series.)
Betrayal
They decide finally not to speak
of it, the one blemish in their otherwise
blameless marriage. It happened
as these things do, before the permanence
was set, before the children grew
complicated, before the quench
of loving one another became all
each of them wanted from this life.
Years later the bite
of not knowing (and not wanting
to know) still pierces the doer
as much as the one to whom it was done:
the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing,
the inimitable lack of touching, the undoing
undone.