Halfway North

The man I was married to for thirty years

is standing behind his girlfriend

at the Wallace pub,

his fingertips light on her back.

She is tall and thin and blonde and

the four-inch heels of her lace-up boots

chip off a piece of the cracked linoleum

footrest when she leans on it. It’s not her fault.

I am built like a fire hydrant and have been shoveling.

I stand aside in hiking boots and flannel-lined pants. 

They go outside to smoke and come back in and

discuss the wedding they’ll go to with the couple

that used to be our travel friends, also sitting

at the bar.  The girlfriend

includes me in the next beer round,

Keweenaw Widow Maker for me, please.

I ask her about the amount of snow

in Tomahawk.  She is staying

at the cabin that I helped build –

so many years ago I shaved strips of bark

from knobby pine trees with

a draw knife, sticky gold curls dropping to the ground.

I am oddly dispassionate about all of this;

I watch myself from above as I finish my beer and leave  

a five on the bar for Judy and walk

out into the antique white March afternoon.

*

Days later the man I met when I was 17

and had three living children with follows me

on Instagram, his username his nickname v2.0,

presumably a better version of himself than I

slept beside, his dreams hung on the scaffolding

of the helix that made him.  It is not his fault.

On the one hand,

this curated view of my life

and in fact much of it, is beautiful,

you can see it yourself:

midnight light in Reykjavik, dense pine forests in Bergen,

streams in Växjö, coffee shops in Amsterdam,

pubs in Oxford, cemeteries in Arisaig,

puffins in Lunga, music festivals and fat bikes,

snowfalls and northern lights,

rivers in twilight, all the,

and only the, beautiful things.

On the other hand,

is that what will you take away?

Will you see that I am happy, wish

you could have had this with me? 

Or do think it lonesome,

are you glad to be shut of me, short, sturdy,

no longer beautiful, hiding behind the lens?

It is not my fault.

It doesn’t matter.

I will let you stand

on the bricks outside this window and look

into my healed and hopeful soul

as the train of night approaches,

the lights inside coming on one by one

while outside, the bright stars

pierce the endless black ceiling

of the universe,

our hands

unclasped.