Divorce Song

A man who is probably my husband sails by. 
But I just see a sailboat, not who steers it. 
But I picture a man, in the gender of things. 

My husband who you will not meet.
He’s off, I don’t know, marshalling.
Ideas, not soldiers. Sailing helps him think. 

I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes 
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly 

decorative, a mermaid on the prow. 
Whether I brought him better luck 
is not my weather to tell. I cost him. 

Time. He costs me. More.

Copyright © 2022 by Jameson Fitzpatrick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This is an excerpt from a book-length riff on Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. The opera’s protagonist, a married noblewoman in eighteenth-century Vienna known as the Marschallin, finds herself facing both the end of an affair and the end of her youth. As I approached the latter juncture myself and decided to transition, she became an unlikely source of solace. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet who penned the libretto, also wrote some thirteen-line terza rimas, which the form of this poem gestures towards. ‘The gender of things’ is cribbed from Anne Sexton’s ‘Consorting with Angels’; the title, from a track on Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville.”
—Jameson Fitzpatrick