The Beauty of the Husband

Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
the emperor would wipe away their tears
with his own hand.

Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.

Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street
or to be staring
at the little sulfur lamps in the grass
all around the edge of the hotel garden
just as they come on. They come on at dusk.

What was he thinking to bring her here?
Athens. Hotel Eremia.
He knew very well. Dètente and reconciliation, let's start again,
thinking oysters and glacè fruits, it needs a light touch,
narrow keys
not very deep.
Hotel gardens at dusk are a place where the laws governing matter
get pulled inside out,
like the black keys and the white keys on Mozart's piano.
It cheered him to remember Mozart
borrowing money every night
and smiling his tilted smile.
Necessity is not real! after all.
The husband swallows his ouzo and waits for its slow hot snow inside him.
Mozart
(so his wife told him at lunch)
scored his Horn Concerto

in four different colors of ink: a man at play.
A husband whose wife knows just enough history to keep him going.
Cheer is rampant in the husband now.
Infinite evening ahead.
Its shoals appear to him and he navigates them one by one
slipping the dark blue keel ropes this way and that
on a bosom of inconceivable silver—ah here she is.
The husband can be seen to rise as his wife crosses the garden.
Why so sad.
No I'm not sad.
Why in your eyes—
What are you drinking.
Ouzo.
Can you get me a tea.
Of course.

He goes out.
She waits.
Waiting, thoughts come, go. Flow. This flowing.

Why sadness? This flowing the world to its end. Why in your eyes—

It is a line of verse. Where has it stepped from. She searches herself, waiting. Waiting is searching.
And the odd thing is, waiting, searching, the wife suddenly knows
a fact about her husband.
This fact for which she had not searched
jerks itself into the light
like a child from a closet.
She knows why he is taking so long at the bar.

Over and over in later years when she told this story she marvelled
at her husband's ability to place the world within brackets.
A bracket's worth of mirage! all he ever needed.
A man who after three years of separation would take his wife to Athens—
for adoration, for peace,
then telephone New York every night from the bar
and speak to a woman
who thought he was over on 4th Street
working late.
And upstairs that night, which proved a long night, as he was dragging
his wounded honor about the hotel room like a damaged queen of moths
because she mentioned Houyhnhnms and he objected
to being “written off as an object of satire,” they moved
several times through a cycle of remarks like—

What is this, what future is there
I thought
You said
We never
When exactly day year name anything who I was who I am who did you
Did you or did you not
Do you or do you not
This excuse that excuse pleasure pain truth
What truth is that
All those kilometers
Faith