My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

Do you trust me?

 

I was caught

Like a fish

Across the room –

Your coal-chip eyes shining into mine.

You shook my father’s hand,

Rings sharp enough to draw blood,

Each one worth more than our car that rattled,

Than our house that creaked and leaked,

Worth more than anything I could earn in a lifetime,

And I thought

“Perhaps his beard is not so blue,

Not so blue after all.”

 

I dreamed often in that house – black dreams,

Frozen dreams –

In that house,

Where the wedding was,

Where my mother drank too much champagne

And my sisters whispered behind their hands and between their phones -

Jealousy or pity?

I could not tell.

 

Such a pretty girl and married to a man with so hard a face,

So blue a beard,

And seven times a husband already.

Where those seven girls have gone not a body knows.

 

Only seventeen and married to a man so old,

Yet see the make and model of the car he drives,

The finery of his wedding suit,

That silk tie,

Those leather shoes.

See the way his cufflinks glitter – diamonds like a cat’s eyes –

And make his beard seem not so blue,

Not so blue after all.

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

I thought that I could learn to love you,

But in the month that we were married I learned only to love

Flat screen TVs

And cars with tops that came down

So I could feel my hair whipping and wheeling in the wind.

Even the glory of your fine old house

Could not shine tenderness into those charcoal eyes

Or make your beard any less the color of the sea.

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

Why give me the key at all?

You may as well have laid the fabled box itself down at my feet,

Inside of which slumber all the evils of mankind –

Sloth, drudgery, avarice, and hope –

And told me not to open it.

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

Did you know that no soap or water,

No steel wool or scratched and bleeding hands

Turned red and raw from scrubbing

Could scrape the blood from off the key?

Even if I had cleaned it

So it shone as bright as day,

You would have seen it in my eyes.

You would have seen the seven dresses with women still in them,

Hanging and turning on their hooks as if floating just above the floor.

You would have seen the basins filled with halfway frozen blood

And the way my scream turned to crystals in the air.

You would have seen what I had seen;

You would have known.

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

Why did you let me pray?

Why did you leave me alone with my sisters?

And the phones between which they are known to whisper?

Why did you pause with your hands around my throat

And turn to watch the headlights as they slipped up the drive?

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

I know the answers to all my questions,

Knew them at the sound of my brother’s gun,

At the sight of blood as it began to bloom across your fine silk tie,

When your coal-chip eyes went dull.

I had never seen a pair of eyes go so dull as that.

I knew you then; I understood.

 

I do not dream in this house,

Where the funeral was,

Where my mother drank too much of everything,

Where my sisters whispered behind their hands and between their phones –

Jealousy or pity?

Now I know.

 

Poor girl,

He would have killed her,

Had it not been for her brothers.

 

A widow now of only eighteen,

And all alone in that fine old house where no man stays for very long.

Where her second husband has got to not a body knows,

But who can blame him,

Running off,

Away from the ghosts and that woman

Whose hair each day becomes more and more the color of the sea.

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

It’s remarkable what some men overlook

In favor of a young woman

And a fine old house with three cars out front.

They see me driving past,

Rings on my fingers worth more than their lives,

And they think,

“Perhaps her hair is not so blue,

Not so blue after all.”

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

I go, every now and then, to visit my sisters

And their husbands,

Each one young and brown-bearded

With kind eyes.

I leave the house in another’s care, tell him,

“This is the key to the safe upstairs,

This to the garden shed,

This to cellar where the wine is kept,

And this is the key to the freezer in the basement,

Where you must never go.”

 

My dear husband,

First husband,

Best.

One day there will be a man whose scream does not cloud the frozen air,

Who does not try to wash the blood from off the key.

One day I will find a man who sits at the door and waits for me.

One day I will find someone like you.