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Marriage as Rant, Rage, Rampage
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Farah Marklevits has been writing a
sequence of poems that take marriage as their subject and that explore the
possibilities and limitations of convention. She has written over twenty of
these poems to date, and they are diverse in approach, style, and tone; they
also exhibit consistent aesthetic choices which create across the poems a
compelling voice. This combination dramatizes the speaker’s restless desire to
have both the comfort of familiar order and the stir of new experience. Some of
the poems are tender; others are funny, angry, unsettling; many combine
expressivity and detachment and domestic stomp in surprising and moving ways.
In “Marriage in the Age of Dreams” and “Marriage: The Scientific Method,”
scientific discourse and associative logic are used toward a lyrical end.
“Marriage as Rant, Rage, Rampage” contains fierce couplets in which random
sonic associations intriguingly clamor against the poem’s contract for meaning,
while the austere sonnet “Marriage” may possibly be the first and only love
poem to convincingly enact with a battered diner glass what Shelley described
as the moment when “soul meets soul on lover’s lips.” You may now read the
writer.
--Heidi Lynn Staples
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Instead of his right hand, the remote
control.
Instead of his left hand, a greased pear.
He must peel three bushels of oranges.
Instead of her right eye, a socket packed
full
of dried petals.
Instead of her left eye,
a ball of salt. She
must choose the winner
of a horse race.
*
He swims laps in the pool
when, oh, her legs wrap
around his neck,
thighs tighten.
He struggles to the shallow
end to breathe—
she’s gone.
Then, he’s at the bottom of the deepest
end,
and the water, ink.
*
She helps him from the car
and he is her
grandfather, then
he is her father,
then,
her brother.
He says, But I only have this one day.
*
He unbuttons her shirt and there is another
shirt.
He slides down the zipper of her skirt,
another zipper underneath.
He slips the shoe
from her left foot, it
turns to stone, and there,
a ballet slipper, a
wool sock. He unwraps
the scarf from her
face—
*
He is a bluegill.
He is a timberwolf.
He is an ostrich.
She is a seahorse.
She is a possum.
She is a parrot.
*
They stop at a small deli/convenience store
in
is Dive & Dime in Red Wing, MN. He
steals
two bars of chocolate
dust. She steals
three plastic bottles of
apple urine juice
from the bathroom,
which is also the stockroom.
The man never tells them to have a nice
day.
*
He wakes and there, at the foot of the bed,
her motionless
silhouette stands,
and she is heavy
beside him,
struggling from under him,
hovers over him, grabs at
him
from behind the bed’s
headboard.
*
There they are, her parents getting
married.
It is 1973. Her father in long side-burns
and a powder blue
ruffle-shirt tux, her mother
in long, wavy hair
and green eye shadow.
The daughter and her husband watch
from the second row on
the bride’s side.
She notices how clean is
the wedding dress
her mother offered to
her, how long the veil.
She thinks, My flowers were better than this.
*
The bluest bowl in her palms, made of sea
water
and clear sky. In it,
the O of her wedding band floats.
Marriage in the age
of rage, of marred rage, of mirage, of Ma Rage, of I age
marred and raged. Marriage in the age of
the aquarium, the stadium, the stage.
Marriage in the age
of states’ rights, of the blank Bill of Rights,
of civil rights, of phantom rights. Marriage
in the age of Might.
Marriage in the age
of reverse commutes, the parking lot dispute,
the age of low repute, of high compute, of cute, of sleazy
cute.
Marriage in the age
of children loud on the playground,
in the age of recess and rubber balls and lost and found.
Marriage in the
industrial age, the dishwasherless age,
the age of terminal degrees, of winning the bread-wage.
Marriage in the age
of ditches, in the age of digging dirt
and wearing skirts, of sorting laundry, the age of sifting
hurt.
Marriage in the
“weekly date” age, the age of making new,
of making do, of they have sex every Saturday at
Marriage in the
co-habitation before marriage age, in the in-law age,
the “This is my family, I’m sorry” or “I’m sorry this is
my family” age.
Marriage in the age
of state control, of penalty and taxation,
of money and balanced accounts, of she has a new-shoe
fixation.
Marriage in the age
of state approval, of social solution,
of how to get a man who’ll stay and pay, eliminate
pollution.
Marriage as a
source of non-foreign oil, as deficit reduction,
as local economy, marriage in the age of marriage
production.
Marriage
in the ageless age of ages aging into more ages.
Marriage as
archaeology, as record set in stone, as study of sages.
Marriage in the age
of monthly cage-matches between ovaries
and careers. Marriage in the age of fear
and Madam Bovaries.
Marriage in the age
of page, marriage in the age of words, in the age
Their theory: They will last.
They will defy parents and all
the hundreds of
thousands of breakers.
She can sing the
One Song until it is
always lovely. He can permutate
two into one with a magical equation.
They begin with what’s given: her body,
his.
Her body as mystery, as unknown with secret
contours, a topographical
something that moves.
His body as
mystery, speaking and unspoken,
straight as test road,
asphalted-over dense earth.
They must excavate
the bodies in order to marry
them off. She wants to
examine her, he wants him
examined—Scrutinize, scrutinize,
leave only
their eyes
to
scrutinize.
Their method: Each night, archive her body,
his:
isolate the part,
identify, dip in formaldehyde,
rinse and place in
alcohol, label, date, and shelve.
They slosh the bone
in its preservative.
They flay skin and
gently tease connective tissue.
Somewhere an
artifact they can reach in him, in her.
Then they will settle—
married, married, married…
Each small artifact the jars magnifies,
then swells
to burst the jar,
squeeze out the preservative juice.
They observe the
whole in each part, through the glass
lens they see them
arguing over the hair-line crack,
the speck of dust on
bone sculpture, the not-quite
geometrical snowflake one of
them made for dinner.
Where did she learn
this fault of cracking,
of inking up, dusting
herself over, where
did he learn to boil
shapes irregular and angry?
They are good observers, they change what
they see.
Their microscope aimed at the glottal cell
transforms
under their eyes, under
the lenses, under the molecules
of air between cell
and lens—it’s now a supernova,
now a galactic event. Observe,
observe,
serve and
observe. The scope trained on
the wife’s arm hair enlarges
the matter
until it’s a coastline,
a shifting plate hefting
the sea to the land.
Their observation
leads to more scrutiny.
Their subjects
keep dancing, changing
the calculations.
Computer models
show that in four months
one of them will be
tempted. In two days
one of them will hurt
the other. In just hours
some piece of her or
him will burst in flames.
They experiment with bliss and bloom,
the control: a
paint-by-fire, the variable: a birthing-swoon.
Not objective, not a gods-eye view. These
scientists
turn on the one self at
the center
and pin and tag and
take home.
They have so many theories, so little room.
Grow a sober lawn, ocher as a tool.
Today is a moanday,
yesterday, an almonday.
Where do we go from here?
Cabbage-picking in the soccer field,
bone-counting in the shed,
shroud-sorting in the basement.
Today is a moanday,
yesterday, an almonday.
Who can say what will make us happy?
Once, we wanted to walk exotic fish,
dine on sugary air,
settle down
in the stars we made
from scratch.
Today is a moanday,
yesterday, an almonday.
Now, in bed, I twist my hair,
you turn pages until
they burn,
both of us breathe
neither flowers nor stars,
but softly suffocate
in the shrouds
I sorted, bones
you counted.
Today the day moans,
all our almondays, yesterdays.
We could have rasped our vows in Rodentese,
in the
I do
I do
in the realm of the super-small,
the theoretical
graviton, theoretical string.
We could have loved the love of ink
drawings,
oil smears, words and
doodles, wed
in two-dimensional.
We could have kissed,
two passion points on
the Euclidian line.
We could have been married riding dolphins
or on the backs of
pterodactyls. Married
on the S. S. Linnaeus, on the hunt for giant
squid.
In a traveling circus—you as the amazing
Fourier Transform shape-shifter, me as
Daredevil Girl
of rubber and steel.
I’d be the five-faced woman,
you’d be the water-trapeze
artist, flaring gills.
We’d both wear sequins and flashing capes
and twirl wonder-words
in the center ring.
We could have married upside-down
on the jungle gym in
fourth grade—
Scraped Knee, take Crooked Too-big Tooth.
We could have pledged our selves on rafts
of tin-foil and
popsicle sticks, eaten a cake
of whitest paste.
Joined ourselves by a routine
surgical procedure or
mind-meld machine.
We could have married in the
we can’t help but
float in. We could have dyed
our skins green and
driven to a ceremony
in Mars rovers. We
could have married
in October or 1873.
We could have been
married in a world where
detergent is edible.
In a world of possibilities, in any
possible world
we could have been
married.
October: apples
huddle and waver
above apples fallen, rotting and rotten.
We can palm
whatever fruit we want,
and who would choose what’s rotten?
Upick, the spray-painted sign says, Upick.
So we settle apples
in clear plastic slings,
we cradle a pumpkin each in our arms,