detail from painting by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner
My wife writes poems
My wife writes poems as email drafts, in the tub
with the door cracked open, she won’t compose
in a document because that seems too permanent,
she says.Usually I walk in at some point to check
on her and she’s writing but she may be looking at
houses for sale, thousands of houses, here, there,
in Providence, Rhode Island, in Greece, in Fall River
Massachusetts, or she may be reading about process
theology, but often enough she’s writing poems and
at times the email draft doesn’t save and that poem
is lost forever, like a house someone else bought, we’ll
never know what it’s like inside or how the light settles
in each room, and I’m usually drinking wine, or coffee,
depending how late she takes her bath, and she will read
to me what she’s written, or show me pictures of six
bedrooms in a house that is overpriced or underpriced.
When I wake up every night and can’t sleep and hear her
soft breathing beside me, her forearm draped over me,
I am tempted to move her arm, get out of bed, open her
phone and look at her poems, written by her as she
lay immersed in warm water, exposed but protected
like in a dream, and find the right person to send each
poem to, one to Jesus, to St Augustine, to her grandma
who visited her once from the unaddressable beyond,
here’s one to the spirit of the flesh, and to the floating
spirit, and to the minute still to pass, and this one’s
for me, this too, and here’s one for you, if you read
you will understand, and another, and for you, you.
Translations from the English 