Very Long Marriage by Elizabeth Jacobson

One of you has slit a finger while opening 

a parcel with the Exacto knife kept by 

the front door, while the other is hanging 

up a coat, tossing keys in a basket. There 

is blood on one of your thighs. One of you 

takes this bleeding finger into your mouth

while one of you puts the parcel down, 

the one who wants to be in love with some-

one else, while at the same time in love 

with what you are, together, in the marriage— 

wants both loves because silence in a backyard 

covered with snow can be silent in the same way 

a bay gleaming with the reflection of sun 

is silent.  And the children, born long ago now, 

born into blood and shit soaked sheets, a room 

streaming with light and elation, the children both 

know the long silences of your marriage, heard one 

of you wanting to destroy the other, watched 

one of you put on your coat and not come back 

for over a month. Startled, one of you wakes 

in a hospital bed following a minor procedure, 

and after looking around the room finds the other, 

and this one, who has just woken up, looks 

at the other as if the other was the one just waking 

up after a minor procedure, and one of you falls 

open upon the other on the propped-up steel bed 

frame, equally exhausted and equally vital, like long-

stemmed tulips in a wide white glass vase, violet 

heads spilling.

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow.  Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book.  She is the Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org and co-founding director of Poetry Pollinators, an eco-poetry public art initiative supporting native solitary bees. Elizabeth curates a community reading series for Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts and teaches poetry workshops regularly in the community.

24 January 2022