MARK HALLIDAY
The marriage was in a last hour of honeycombed decay,
you could tell by the moaning sound of trolleys
and the way memories had gone scaley-thin, one puff of wind
would blow marriage fragments all over the city;
I climbed the dark stairs and sprawled on the sofa,
my wife was extremely not home. The clock was loud
and busy and imperturbable in such dry air.
A phone call to my father seemed a good idea;
seemed necessary; it was the only idea.
I looked around for the phone. Things were different—
because of our being so wrong Annie and I let small things
go awry: the tail of a dead mouse stuck out
from behind a dresser and squirrels played polo
inside the walls so the house trembled
and my stomach too trembled like a dog in its sleep
and our black phone was gone. Then our landlords walked in,
our fat Irish landlords except now they were our tenants
and their children were Chinese and they all spoke
cheerfully about packages of dried noodles and puttered away
in a cloud of happy family. I should call my father—
room to room I walked behind a ribbon of shadow
emitted from a song called “I Don’t Wanna Fade Away”…
All the lightbulbs were fading; on the carpet
were plops of Thanksgiving gravy; nothing mattered
compared to what mattered. Annie knew this.
Finally in her room I found the phone but it was not black
it was yellow, and it was so complicated, you had to plug it in
three different ways and wind it up and little crucial
knobs and hooks and rings kept falling loose in my hand.