After It’s Finished: First Marriage
Indescribably noble and imposing…it is full
of poetry and suggestion. Infinite wisdom;
a past without beginning and a future
without end; a repose, after limitless
experience in this austere and beautiful
face and form.
John Clay
Describing the Adams Memorial
to Henry Adams
At Rock Creek Cemetery Eleanor
Roosevelt strode close and closer still
to the stone and metal bonded grace
of Clover Adams—both alone. She'd been
told about Lucy Mercer. Did she know
about Lizzie Cameron? Common? Some-
one they love doesn’t love them
as much? And their carapace is struck
is broke off from their throat, their
voice’s home. It’s impossible not to be
pulled by the chemical serenity Clover drank
when she was 42, pouring down
to the ground, pulling up, finally, the earth’s
solid balm. The five Sibyls, and the one
Kwannon were St. Gauden’s force of
uncoming, of arriving the women from
what’s suffered. But from what mile
mark? What mile? I’ve seen her only,
Clover, in Cornish, cloistral in the cedar
hedges if that’s what they are because I can’t
remember paying them a name, only
the space they caved toward, forward
to her hooded, almost genderless chin
and cheek. Did Eleanor come to this same
place too—not Cornish necessarily but
maybe she walked past Abraham
Lincoln and some of his
generals, past the Puritan too if any
of these were reduced and installed. I’m
not sure it’s her steps I want to follow or some
how Clover’s, the coming undone
as plain as taking away a marriage
maimed overcloak, a dress, a still thinner
robe, a step up to the glass as naked as I can make
myself stand
and see into the rock water not myself rising
up reflecting but maybe a glass negative
of a photo exposed to the perfect within a rational
fraction, time of dark/light when, just
before it’s too much and burns to scar, it is
clarity on the lips, it is honest, it is being
betrayed and still, after all is lost and blown,
walking out alive, broke open by it shuddering
aftershock but full somehow and, (though
it may be some time coming up out
of the chemical cleanse) whole.
