the one who picked another wife, another life
on the other coast. The one who chose
the one nearby, the younger one, the one
who had a son. Praise them for toughening us,
for bracketing the time we shared, sticking it
in footnotes, in envelopes on which we wrote
their names, a birthday card their kid found
in a book on native plants, their name
inscribed above ours, love comma our name.
Their handwriting, we know it decades on,
can’t unrecognize it, the slope and paraph,
even the marginal squiggle in Keats
or Derrida will go to the grave with us.
It is wrought in the iron of our brains.
Praise our brains for keeping them out
of our hearts, for letting them go where they went.
