Читать книгу Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems - Stephen Dunn - Страница 7
ОглавлениеRachel Becomes Mrs. Cavendish
She moved into his name
willingly, for reasons phonetically
and otherwise obvious.
She especially liked that Cavendish
had a ring of entitlement to it
among bankers and brokers
in the New Jersey suburbs
where they moved to escape
her friends, and join his.
She was young, and had a sense
of what could be called waspy fun.
She’d never met anyone like him.
Both of them kept me off balance in those days.
When I’d visit I’d find myself half-beguiled,
half-annoyed, by how she’d tell lies
about things we’d experienced together.
But what could I do? She was in the act
of becoming Mrs. Cavendish, and I knew
from then on I’d keep her past
in the same closed-up closet
where I kept my own dark secrets.
In that way her husband and I became
keepers of her preferred memories.
He knew I loved her, but thought of me
as an adoring remnant, essentially prehistoric.
The truth is always different
from what anyone says out loud,
but who really cares? Not I, said the man
I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I—
among the many of us she left teetering.
