Love Poetry Again

It is amazing to me to see how far I have come in the five years since my marriage ended. Here is what I wrote four years ago this month under the weight of emotional pain which threatened to topple me.  I hardly recognize the hurting woman behind the words.  I wish I could tell "old me" that it would be alright...that as brutal as the end was, I would one day be grateful that it cleared the way for a bigger life and a bigger love, and a relationship with God that put all other relationships in perspective.
**************************************************************
February 2011:  I'm donne with yeats

Valentine's Day is around the corner.  Cheesy as it sounds, my husband and I actually did read poetry to each other every February 14th.  I probably started the tradition ten years ago.  We'd each hold a book of collected love poems and take turns reading our favourites to each other.  John Donne for me. William Butler Yeats for him.


" ...one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  And loved the sorrows of your changing face", he would read and I would feel that familiar ache that comes with encountering words that are so wondrously strung together. "Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide late school-boys and sour prentices..." I would read and anticipate how afterwards we'd delight in rolling our tongues around the words saucy pedantic wretch over and over.                                                                                                            

No love poetry for me this year.  My daughter heads off to university in the fall.  This was supposed to be the beginning of the best years... no empty nest syndrome for me.  My husband and I would travel. We would be adventurers, socialites, activists, foodies, bookclub junkies and ecotourists.  We would spend weekends making brunches, eating European cheeses and sampling wines from countries whose borders we'd not yet traversed.  And as for those countries we had explored, they were already marked on the wall sized world map I'd given my husband for his birthday: green thumbtacks for the countries we'd only visited together and white thumbtacks for the countries in which we'd made love.  White for surrender; waving the white flag; white for the ultimate capitulation.  I wonder if he still has that map on the wall in his office.  If so, did he remove the white tacks out of deference to the  new woman in his life?  I wish I could tell her: there was Canada, the U.S., Mexico, France, Germany, Switzerland, Korea, China, Thailand, St. Lucia, Grenada.  This year we could have added England, Greece and New Zealand if he'd stuck it out.   Even in my moments of most intense self-recrimination I cannot discern what I did that could have warranted the utter repudiation of his love, his marriage vows, his optimism about us, his commitment to our marriage.  After 10 months of spinning my wheels trying to decide which one of us has the brain tumour, I am embarking on a new path.  I am conceding defeat.  I cannot fight the battle alone.  He has won.  The marriage is dead: a different kind of white flag.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Christmas, hotels, dogs and assailants

Image
Over the Christmas holidays, I spent time travelling like many do, to see family and loved ones.  Last night in the middle of a deep freeze, I embarked on the four hour trek from my mother’s home back to my own.  Partway through the journey, I experienced some car trouble and pulled off the highway into a gas station. With all the auto repair shops having closed for the night, I decided my only option was to check into a hotel.  I am not sure when the man began following me.  Was it in the gas station where I lifted the hood of my car? The Canadian Tire parking lot? The hotel lobby? I will never know…but what I’d already thought was turning out to be a disastrous evening was going to get worse. Because I was travelling with my dog Georgie, the hotel clerk assigned me to a “pet-friendly” room in a building that was separate from the main hotel.  It was a short drive behind the main building to a smaller building that had its own parking lot- dark and empty.  I was too frazzled from
Read more

Can I write happy?

Can I write happy?  I don’t know that I can.  Everything that I’ve ever written and been proud of came from intense sadness, overwhelming disappointment, or terrifying despair.  How can anything other than rich evocative relatable language emerge from those places? But this?  Such unfamiliar bliss.  Such unexpected contentment.  It is only mid-morning and my heart is already full of an entire day’s quota of happiness.  Already I’ve felt an embarrassment of riches. I've been the focus of a man's love and the focus of a dog’s adoring stare.  I’ve enjoyed breakfast in the company of a good book, and now I drink coffee with cream and sit beside a fire…its mellow flames rising to the same height as the snow that sits on my patio furniture outside. My daughter is asleep upstairs, so I am alone without the sadness of actually being alone.  She will come down eventually and take care of herself as adult children do. She won’t need me as she once did.  She will not insist on the
Read more

Remembering my father on the anniversary of his death

Image
Eight years ago this evening I had eight chicken breasts in the oven – Chicken Parmigiana - for a dinner party with a group of girlfriends, when the phone rang.  It was my mother calling to say that I should come home quickly. My father was in the hospital and had taken a turn for the worse. He wasn't going to make it, the doctor told her.  I phoned one friend to cancel the dinner and asked her to call the others. I wrapped the chicken and put it in the trunk of my car. I rummaged through my closet for a black dress, and told my 13-year-old daughter to do the same. Somehow we threw together things to put in a suitcase and drove 4 1/2 hours straight to the hospital where my father lay dying. He was still lucid when we arrived. He was genuinely surprised to see us. "What are you guys doing here?" he asked, apparently unaware that he had only hours to live. What could we say? That we were there because we wanted to be with him at the end of his life? That we were ther
Read more