Stephen Lackaye

Marriage

after Dickey

If we’re lucky, there may always be
some mysteries between us,
even if I’ve learned the things you like—
the ribbons at your wrists and throat,
a little time on Sundays to read, 

how suddenly my hand in your hair
becomes a fist – and those you don’t—
the laundry when there’s none to do,
my opening and closing of the fridge—
because we have both asked questions

we don’t want the answers to, agreed
upon safe words to use when
none of them, in their chosen moments,
work. What else can you do, you say,
when I’ve been eight months laid off 

and lately silence worries us
more than any answer. Some work
is not far from our pleasures,
and others getting paid for it buy shoes
and all the other junk we’ve had to

eat instead of, going on a year. Experience
hasn’t stopped me so much as what I refuse.
My love, I understand, the silence is the worst of it,
the worst of how we have to live
together. We’ve had our civil drinks

and talk again. The clock is stalled on
our worst year, the hand never stops
being a fist. It’s okay, okay to ask. After all,
what’s a little pain, a certain amount of pain
that we could put an end to? Forgive me.

Say the word or don’t. You know
by now the things I wouldn’t try again.
Only the past is strange anymore.
Do you remember we once believed
there was a right kind of exhaustion?

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Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Eric Hoffer Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review and Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.