Belle Waring

The Wolbrook Junction High School History Teacher Watches His Wife Receive the "Social Worker of the Year" Award

And suddenly, leaning into the edible ear
of a man with a well-honed beard, she was a babe-
yet I was so unjealous that for one
perverse moment, I wished he'd steal her from me-
then wondered if she regarded me across
the darkened hall with the same blunt middle-aged
exhaustion.

           That didn't come out right.

It was more than just a marriage moment.

It was when she spoke, making her audience
lean forward in their seats-I could hardly
look at them, they were so correct, and even
when they reared back laughing at her absurdist
social worker wit, they seemed so innocent,
like doctors in a fresh battalion, doomed.

But they don't know it yet.

I'm trying to get at something in the mind.

At Antietam--1862--
tens of thousands died, so thick in blood
and putrefaction there was no way to credit
that individual soldier, man or boy,
exists--
           so many arms and legs, you must
decide which limbs to cut, which ones to save,
which ones to wait and watch and then regret
you didn't amputate, because--mark you--
later you may not shoot them mercifully, like mules.
You'll watch them die of the gangrene, the screams
Sweet Holy Christ so childish and tangled
and extreme that it's not possible to cling
to the idea that the individual man even
exists.

          Her audience--I think they do not want
to know--it can twist quickly to despair--
they think that they can help the poor--no, they
think a poor man is a one that can be saved--
no, too right wing--I mean that they assume
a one exists.

               This is not politics. My wife
at forty, with her intense intelligence,
the way her eyes reflect the light, my womanly,
my tough, my wife works Child Protection, goes
with the cops in Lombard to bust people
stuffing their offspring into toilets--she's not
naïve. I mean that it's hard for a man to bear
a mind moment on the bitter side,
when you see that we aren't here the way
we think.

               And you think I'm just depressed. You think
it's mannish envy.

                        It is the mortal shock
of seeing through the -ologies I studied.

And it feels like shit.

                              Then let this be the flipside
of some over-matching joy. The obdurate fact--
that I do not exist as I--could be
the obverse of some truth that includes what happened
next.

        My wife walked through a river of applause
to kiss me wet, and I--

                                 I fell for her

                                              and sank down, fathomless.

Back to IR Fall 1997