Marriage was the thing though, wasn’t it,
your father’s marriages, your marriage.
Somewhere in the shrink or sprawl of them,
the bank tellers started taking notice; your eyes rose up the shelves
of wine at the store. Your hand encircling the neck of glass
was not like the captive snake wrapping up
its neatly halved mammal. Your hand was not like your hand
gripping the doorknob of your childhood bedroom,
the one that if turned without care
would fall away, like a heavy, beveled apple,
exposing the mechanism that actually opened the door:
a tiny ungraspable spike thrust toward you.
An only child, with your own room.
Not as much food as you would have liked some nights
but plenty to muscle your lengthening bones,
add a gloss to your hair. You had clouds painted on your ceiling—
clouds that could never merge or move, produce rain,
but you felt rain, you felt it all the time.
Not the loose mist of the city
you would search one day for a new home,
but real rain, made real by its force,
its heft: you felt it
plaster you down into something
more sculpted, newborn, amphibious
instrument of unknown purpose. When did you
become adjacent to wealth? Was it in the womb? Was it
down the aisle? You grew your hair long
and curling down your spine. You watched
the anaconda at the small-town zoo, submerged in its pool behind glass
splashing, a live knot, a wild atom,
the rabbit’s ice-flecked eye at the center, dense from the freezer,
eager, eager— You were, weren’t you.