Husband Blues by Jeannie Van Rompaey Poem by Jeannie van Rompaey

Husband Blues
by Jeannie van Rompaey

Ten years we'd been together
Before I felt the weight of him
And knew he intended to stay.

For ten long years he dreamed his own dreams,
Retreated to a cool dark place I could not breach.

I overheard him speak to another woman, an intimate moment at a party.
He spoke of his life as a habit, a trap.
He dreamt, he said, of an escape to white-sand beaches
Where he could stretch out his weary bones in the sun
Until they bleached to burnt out skeleton.

This is my husband, I thought,
A man who feeds on dreams of death,
The man I've chosen to love.

That night I wound him in a shroud
Of cool white sheets,
Whispered sweet songs of death into his ear,
Made him my own at last.

Now he shares his deathly dreams with me
And I comply, pleased to live with him
In a sun-drenched land where, side by side,
We line up our bones to dry like fossils.
Relics of our melancholic life together.

And if he wants to go to Alaska instead
I'll go there too,
Prepared to put our love on ice
For eternity.