Seed Across Snow

With a Shiner, My Husband Enters the Flower Shop

91 With a Shiner, My Husband Enters the Flower Shop I should be thinking about him and how he could have lost an eye when the malignant scaffolding collapsed and a 2 x 4 dropped through the air on the job site the morning of our nineteenth anniversary, but I’m considering her, the florist looking up from her table to see him walking in sheepish, headbowed , ringing the bell as he enters. I’m wondering how many times she’s arranged roses for the wounded, the bruised, the stitched hungry male who needs her help—and fast. and I wonder if she imagines me, black cast iron skillet, cocked in hand like a baseball bat as she pulls out the three stems of delphinium, blue as a bruised heart and two full hydrangea, pink petaled and soft as boxed lingerie. There is not, baby’s breath, I’m relieved to see, nor the red lips of soft roses, nor the ubiquitous and overly cheerful 92 mum. she knows, somehow, what he does not—preoccupied with his day to day—that even a good long marriage holds small hurts that barb and fester near the skin, so she reaches for the balm of calm sweep of palm leaf, that healer of the unsaid argument of morning, the rising blood as I watched him back out in his truck, his having forgotten—once again—this morning of all mornings— to hang up the towel, curled like a wet dog asleep on the bathroom floor. a long marriage remembers its youth as a roan, muscled horse, rearing, with nostrils flared. I accept this bouquet for what I could have said but didn’t, and hold onto the thin healing. I accept, too, finally, that often a long marriage is a donkey schlepping across the desert. Tender-eyed, I attempt 93 to once again re-love husband as self, to heal the wounded eye as one tries to heal self. and accept the vase on the table which stands to remind, each day as I change its water, that even this good marriage is from time to time a sorry animal, in need, and overburdened, but grateful for the hard day it closes sore eyes against. 94 This page intentionally left blank. 95 This page intentionally left blank. ...