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41 throwing out the Marriage Bed Day after Christmas, our headboard, frame, and bureau mirror of nearly forty years propped atop our rubbish bags, like Huck and Jim’s lean-to aboard their errant raft, or Noah’s wayward ark, the mirror like a solar window, useless now for forty days. When they come, our garbage men, crisscrossing, Carhartted, one darker than the other, they know without speaking they will have to come together to get the lifting done, their hands knowing exactly what to do, the solid oak spindles settling evenly, cleanly, within the mouth of the truck. It is as if they are married, these two, have been for years, like the paired moving men who, sweating and moaning, pushed and pulled the new bed up the stairs yesterday, and who said in unison, smacking their hands, that it would last us a lifetime, then looked at us like children, awed, as if they had said something profound by accident, like cavemen discovering the fire of speech after dragging something home, or EMTs with ADD, carrying heavy death into the house by mistake, who would have to take it back out again now. We do not have a lifetime. The bed will outlive us, the weight of it alone enough to keep us in this place, Penelope, delivered Odysseus, olive tree as corner post. This is the bed we will die in, perhaps, each in our time, the one neither of us will live to see lifted from the street, however carefully, even gently, like water spilling slowly over a dam at the break of day. Look now, how they tender the mirror into the open bay, how it fills with the light of the moving, diluvial world. ...

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