Marriage Counseling: a poem

On an idle Monday in March I sit by a brook,

staring at silver fingers of ice bob from branches.

There are glass skins on the stones. It looks like spring, but feels

like winter as I note the radiant likeness between snow crystal and

the diamond of my wedding ring. Beyond my rock there is a wall

built to divide property, to enforce boundaries, to separate sides.

Stonewalling is a term in counseling used to describe a person

who refuses to communicate or engage.

In his defense, my husband never wanted to go, but felt forced

by what I didn’t say when I said, “I can’t keep living this way.”

In his defense, the Army taught him to desensitize the day

he became a cadet at a military academy fortressed in stone.

It was Frost who said that earth is the right place to love, in a

poem about birch trees—that he didn’t know where it's likely to go better.

I don’t either. But I wanted more skin, more stamina, more than

eight sessions before my husband said, “I’m done. D-O-N-E—done.”

And then: the tender, true, non-threat: “I feel like I’m going to die.”

I felt secure in the exposure, but his war siren sounded.

The brook carries on next to me, like tin chimes.

I peel a piece of bark from a birch tree and write, disappointment

over marriage counseling ending on its tender, peach belly.

I let it go—perhaps not the repeating pattern of expectation,

disappointment, and resentment, but I do let the sliver of tree skin slip under the ice.

As I lament, nature persists. I just never thought love would feel like this.

On the way home, I pass a sign outside the paint store:

“It’s not all black and white, but more a nice shade of gray,”

and I think: that person has never been married—or “right.” Then I laugh.

The truth is, the birch bark caught on an icy fringe and I went back for it—

fished it out with a stick. It would have carried on if I had let it be.

It would have found another way, at another time.