A Marriage Book Read online

  Praise for James P. Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book

  “These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight.”

  — CHASE TWICHELL

  “In this age of cynicism, or at the very least irony, it is good to come upon a book that celebrates marriage and family without either sentimentality or ambivalence. ‘So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything,’ Lenfestey writes. ‘This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.’”

  — LINDA PASTAN

  “Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things: stories, images, metaphors, but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of ‘My Wife Sleeping as I Drive,’ Lenfestey writes: ‘We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue-black sky full / of oncoming lights and stars.’ How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!”

  — JIM MOORE

  “Think of Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. The lovers meet and marry; the children arrive and grow up. Along the way, there are days of joy and anxious nights, sweetness and humor. The narrator is a courageous ‘captain,’ an ‘old shepherd / exhausted with tending,’ and a ‘Marco Polo,’ but like his predecessors, he always returns to his center, his wife, who is (as he says) his life. What a fine tribute to fifty years of real-world love!”

  — JOYCE SUTPHEN

  “Lenfestey’s poems encircle a marriage while opening it out into the depths and heights with tenderness—I might say reverence—and grace. The poems move from outer rituals into the interior world of the self that wants to make sense of birth, joy, damage, death, and grief, but can’t, entirely. You want to know how it is to stay through the long haul? Look to these poems. ‘It is gravity, / which limits us totally, / which makes all life possible,’ Lenfestey writes. These are the poems of a brave heart and a skilled poet. They will make you want to kiss your sweetheart.”

  — FLEDA BROWN

  “I’ve been an avid reader of Lenfestey’s work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder, and so is his Marriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the ‘shared heat’ of love. This is, above all, a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, with Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read.”

  — ROBERT HEDIN

  “I just finished reading A Marriage Book straight through. Such a treasure. Virtuosic, with all the different moods and colors and shadings and statements and counterstatements, and so beautiful. A very wonderful book.”

  — ELIZABETH GORDON MCKIM

  “These generous poems, attractive in their emotional directness, confident in their subject matter, bring us into contact with the intimacies of an intensely lived life, insisting both on their frequent joys—there is playfulness, there is fervor—and on disclosing the vulnerabilities that demanding relationships reveal in us over the decades.”

  — MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE

  ALSO BY JAMES P. LENFESTEY

  POETRY

  Earth in Anger: Twenty-Five Poems of Love and Despair for Planet Earth

  A Cartload of Scrolls: One Hundred Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan

  Into the Goodhue County Jail: Poems to Free Prisoners

  The Toothed and Clever World

  Saying Grace

  Odalisque

  Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs (editor)

  If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems (editor)

  NONFICTION

  The Urban Coyote: Howlings on Family, Community and the Search for Peace and Quiet

  Robert Bly in This World (coeditor)

  Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain

  © 2017, Text by James P. Lenfestey

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  milkweed.org

  Published 2017 by Milkweed Editions

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Author photo by Larry Marcus

  17 18 19 20 21 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lenfestey, James P., author.

  Title: A marriage book / James P. Lenfestey.

  Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions,

  2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017039309 | ISBN 9781571314925 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.E528 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039309

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. A Marriage Book was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Thomson-Shore.

  for Susan

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Who Would Believe

  PART ONE: LIE LOVE EASY

  Lie Love Easy

  Aerie and High

  Shared Heat

  Woodsmoke and Perfume

  To Make a Baby

  An Engineering Problem

  The Bath

  After She Sleeps

  Lunch-making

  Saturday Night

  Oh God, How Deep

  They Will Have to Understand

  Here, Take This Poem

  Even as the Passion Cools

  The Hand of God

  PART TWO: SHE WHO THINKS LIKE A FISH THINKS

  Self-Portrait: Newborn Father and Son

  She Who Thinks Like a Fish Thinks

  Learning to Speak Max

  If We Were Bears

  Singing the Babies to Sleep

  Don’t Leave Albert Einstein with the Kids!

  Monster at the Breakfast Table

  When You Are Ready, Climb

  Strawberries<
br />
  Angel at Eighth-Grade Graduation

  If You Become a Monk

  To a Young Daughter

  To My Daughter at Fourteen in the Aftermath of the First Full Moon

  Driving Lesson: To My Son at Sixteen

  Chores

  Acres of Diamonds

  Prayer

  For a Rescued Daughter, an Artist, Coming Up for Air through Water

  Backscratch Boy

  A Wild Wood

  Troubadour Song

  Morning of the Wedding

  Midnight Call

  Christmas Prayer, Santa Fe, December 25, 1993

  On a Youngest Daughter’s Acceptance at the College of Her Choice

  On Course

  Once in the Sixties

  PART THREE: AND STILL SHE BLOOMS

  In Her Garden, She

  Two Knives

  Fall Colors

  Departure

  Expedition Alone

  Skin Like Botticelli’s Venus

  My Wife Sleeping as I Drive

  And Still She Blooms

  At the Temple of Aphrodite

  Swimming in the Sea of Time

  New New Mexico Woman

  You Know What I Know

  The Poet Visits His Son, a Concert Promoter, and Attends a Michael Franti Concert

  Dancing at Winter Solstice

  Wild Swans Near Gladstone

  Before the Grandchildren Arrive

  Watching Gus Draw

  End of Summer

  A Mirror in Rome

  Here Is My Promise to You, or Marco Polo Leaves the Kitchen for the Provinces

  When I Am Eighty

  EPILOGUE

  Wedding Poem

  Acknowledgments

  In the final analysis, poets and novelists will have more to say about love than psychologists, for they express the inexpressible, and describe individual persons and their love problems, with their individual solutions and failures, and this is true to life and to eros.

  John Sanford, The Invisible Partners

  PROLOGUE

  WHO WOULD BELIEVE

  Even a good poet must be wary as a spider

  offering a book of love poems

  to the woman he married fifty years ago.

  If he exaggerates his love, she’ll know.

  If he denies it, she’ll devour him

  while remembering her old dead lovers.

  If he sands off the edge of his desire,

  what’s the point?

  And if his desire for her is undiminished,

  who would believe?

  PART ONE

  Lie Love Easy

  LIE LOVE EASY

  pores, pouring, pouring over

  lying under, lying, lie

  stroke soft furry truths

  in the lap

  pet soft purring truths

  in the lap

  take a long time

  jiggle hills easy

  love time

  gentle hills roll

  lick your fur

  lick your fur, cat

  make a breeze

  in the forest tangle

  kiss the slick

  leaves

  one and one

  become easy

  ease away

  the forest anger

  lie love

  please, no dread

  please, no leaving

  lie love easy

  AERIE AND HIGH

  I call to her from across

  the room,

  she hears hawks

  high over rolling hills

  we arc up, roll and join

  and roll away,

  high eyes glistening down

  I brush her once here,

  graze her once there,

  she feels wings

  I give her my licks of wing,

  sharp flicks of talon,

  my rough, cruel voice,

  my down

  we fall

  we fall

  we fall

  toward that river

  that soil

  that call

  Aerie and high

  aerie and deep

  we nest there

  we nest there

  and sleep.

  SHARED HEAT

  There is a certain hairy roughness

  to overcome, I understand,

  for me it is all easy,

  like biting into warm

  sour cream.

  To touch, then

  near sleep,

  to fold together

  like egg whites, like gears,

  then sleep without touching,

  sharing heat.

  Shared heat.

  Is this not the peace and comfort

  of the species?

  Why we gather under heavy

  robes in winter?

  Why we sew together

  such huge quilts?

  Roll apart, not touching

  in the night sleep.

  But never far,

  never too far,

  from the heat.

  WOODSMOKE AND PERFUME

  As a boy, there were

  few women.

  There was the woman

  who smelled of woodsmoke

  and the woman

  who smelled of perfume.

  There was the woman to be

  danced with

  for the last dance,

  and the woman to walk home

  holding her hand.

  The woman who

  wanted to be loved

  and lay there,

  and the

  woman who wanted to love

  and I lay there.

  And the woman who said noc

  while our minds went mad,

  and the woman who said yes

  who went mad.

  And the woman who said no

  who called and said yes

  and the woman who went mad

  who never called.

  And then the woman

  who said yes

  and yes and again yes,

  you asshole, not that way.

  Yes.

  TO MAKE A BABY

  These days it takes courage.

  No one has enough money.

  Nobody has enough time.

  No way is there enough room

  in the house.

  So you find yourself crowded

  into that double bed.

  And the kids are asleep.

  The checkbook’s downstairs.

  You bump into something warm.

  And you find your courage rising.

  AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM

  What would you do?

  I was asleep.

  She tried to entice me.

  She arched herself over me

  like a pre-tensioned bridge beam.

  The smooth arc of her calves

  was enough to drive retired engineers

  to recalculate fundamental forces—

  the tensile strength of skin,

  the compressive strength of thighs,

  the pressure and flow dynamics of laying

  mile after mile of pipe

  underground.

  Where do you get off? I inquired.

  In the bathtub, she responded.

  She asked me to join her.

  But this groggy engineer

  couldn’t do the calculations:

  displacement, volume,

  there’s no room for two

  is all I could figure.

  Don’t worry, she said,

  we’ll work it out.

  What would you do?

  Here’s what I did.

  I got up.

  I wrote a poem.

  While she soaked and softened,

  I typed uncalculated lines

  in my office next to the bathtub.

  I could hear the water rustle

  once, twice, a hundred times.

  She entered my office from behind me
<
br />   as I typed.

  She wore a nightgown with pores of lace,

  hair piled loosely, ringlets dipped

  in water touching her neck.

  She was warm and soft and groggy

  as she hung her heavy arms around me.

  “I love your poems,” she said.

  We built a bridge.

  THE BATH

  I caught her as she slipped

  into the tub.

  She held him in her hands,

  flushed and embarrassed.

  Then settled

  into the tendrils of steam

  curling off the surface,

  eyes heavy with his heft.

  She ran her slick fingers up

  and down his spine.

  He’s deep, she said.

  And endlessly fascinating.

  And I love him, I love him.

  My eyes burned through the water

  toward the tangled story I call home.

  But his chapters are long, she said.

  And he’s such a fine . . . writer.

  I stumbled to our bed, determined

  to take matters into my own hands.

  I reached for García Márquez

  and was soon lost in tangled limbs

  and the seduction of rivers.

  I rolled and moaned