Before Cursing God, I Pray to my Wife

I’ve forced you to sleep too many nights alone

beside me. I’ve let you cry

in a room you’d built for us

while I built my life into a cell
and made you the window I look out of.

But I tell you the silence in me

would miss your voice.

The first week I ever spent without you was you
creating my world in seven days. I tell you

happy people bother me, but happy

is still what I hope you are

because if I’d never met you
I’d never have met me.

This little life we’ve made

is bigger than any word. Any wound
I’ve convinced myself has its own shores.

I say little the way most might say,

“Jupiter, from here, seems little.” The way

someone says, “A little,” after someone asks,
“Are you afraid of dying?”

I wish I could think of a better word for our life,

but I’ve never seen a star up close.

I’ve never swallowed a garden
and felt a thousand species living and dying inside me.

I’ve only sat in the dark at a wedding recently

and watched you dance

through three songs without me. Three.

Which is how many times the word happy
happens in this poem,

it’s how many people in one

God is, they say, and it’s how many times
I’ve had to learn to live without you.

Three is enough. Even for God apparently.

So after the third song,

I stood up in that crowded reception hall,