Lie

That’s us: the bruise on my thigh, a Camel
dangling from your beautiful mouth
and this our favorite wedding picture. The vows:
      (1) Do I take thee Wife
as wedge against the fear
of sleeping alone
in Southeast Asia?
      (2) Do I take thee Husband as solace
for all the girls ever wanted? For the ones kissed
and held by and held.

Twenty years later I am queer as
a happy Monday and you dead from cancer—
lung or liver, I no longer know
anyone to ask and made up the cause, cancer 
I say, because the paper said you died at home.
And that there was a child after besides the one before
and nothing to mark the one 
we washed away.
I dream of her sometimes, little toothless sack of skin.
with something, nothing, something 
swimming inside. 
                                     But more often
I dream of a house I once lived in,
a certain room, a street, its light. I wake 
trying to remember which country, 
what language. Not the house
where we lived and its bodies.
How they come and go

late at night, nearly dawn. I am making 
crepes and coffee and the group from the bar 
can’t believe their luck.
What did we talk about? I am trying to remember
and not trying to remember
how I tried or never tried to love you.

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“I think most poets are obsessed with memory and I am no exception. I have moved around a great deal in my life, and I dream often about the houses and rooms of places where I once lived. When I dream about those pasts, it’s as if they are ongoing, simultaneous with the life I live now, the place I now inhabit, spatially and temporally. The dreams are charged with both loss and relief, offering distillations of memory I can’t fully trust. I am left wondering what finally matters more, the past or the story we construct about the past.”
—Janet McAdams