Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women's Voices

To Mary Rockwell, now dead

13 To Mary Rockwell, now dead They thought you’d finally killed yourself. Well, of course. You had lived with the threat for so long it had grown smooth as a stone in their pockets. You wore suicide —not the whole gown — but accessories —one day its shoes, another its hat. You offered it to yourself each day like a slice of toast, like a lemon tart, like a walk round the lake on the hottest day in summer. A swim? Did you get to glimpse the irony — after all of your staging, this sudden death, unplanned, as if a banquet can simply break out, as if a wedding party has appeared on the lawn with lanterns floating in the limbs of trees as if your fourth child, the one aborted by the Brit, was born, after all, and grew — how he loves you, how time turns, how death swells, tastes nothing like you would expect and greets you with a rushing lion’s love. Or not. A light switch fails, a bulb gives a hollow ping; the room is dark. ...