Fidelity: Trying to Stay Warm at Fifteen Below

lock and key
Thoreau's cell

Fidelity: Trying to Stay

Warm at Fifteen Below

At two in the morning I’m doing

laundry while the rest

of the house sleeps, I listen

to the story out loud and stand

in the kitchen waiting for a place

to pause: if I carry it

upstairs and out loud two hours

into the new day I’ll wake them

all, I’ll take them out

of their dreams like I was just

taken, this one about waiting

for my ex-husband to get home

to dinner and in the dream he was

already home he’d just chosen

not to come upstairs to the table

and the steak was getting cold

and the spinach too and the rest

every bit of it hung low and cold

hunched shoulders on a pool

of juice going firm, a solid au jux,

globs I’d prick with my fork

and watch the flaked fat fix

itself to the tines.  Why is it,

waiting for them as we seem

to be asked to do while they laugh

with friends and drink and keep us

upstairs in a cage we wait

gratefully, we learn to say

he married me didn’t he, out

of all the rest he married me.

Before the bell goes off, in the dream

I’ve become brave enough to go

down asking when he’s

coming home and by the time

I navigate all the stairs (why

are there always so many flights

of stairs in dreams?) he’s taken off

his tie and there are guests

and it’s a party I’m not invited

to and I call him up, up to

where I’m standing by the open

French doors and ask

when are you coming home? 

and his shirt buttons are gone

and his lips shine and everyone

is laughing their good time

laugh and I think I see him shoot me

an oh no not her glance before he

slides over on my side

of the room and says, as though

he’s on the phone, “honey, I think

I’m going to be late, don’t wait

up.”  And my waking up

alarm goes off as I’m turning around

to go back upstairs, as he’s turning

around to go back to his party.

He’s the only one between us

who’s laughing.  Awake now and in

the basement I’m folding clothes

and listening to a woman tell

a story about a rabbi who was sick

in her blood and scheduled weekly

transfusions on Wednesdays

so she could be her best for Shabbat.

Her transfusionist doctor confesses,

after she is well, that she is alive

with the blood of all kinds of religions, even

the blood of atheists has touched her

walls of her veins and arteries

and flowed through all the chambers

of her heart and this is where I

pause, in the middle of the story

because I’m needed upstairs, there

are blankets to tuck under

the chins of my children, kids I didn’t

have with my ex-husband, as if

by instinct, as if I knew

all those late night women were making me

infertile.  And though I could never

prove that for sure, just like the Rabbi

who can never prove God

to the atheist doctor, I’m the one now

with a boy and a girl and the Rabbi’s

the one with the shining eyes and with all

that other blood, blood of every kind

and it stays warm, it moves in her

and it is an au jux she drips into

when she prays or when she remains

silent or crawls into deeper

like blankets or good dreams or selves

that don’t go cold on the plate

and break away like flakes of cooling

fidelities.