Praise for James P. Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book
“These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight.”
— CHASE TWICHELL
“In this age of cynicism, or at the very least irony, it is good to come upon a book that celebrates marriage and family without either sentimentality or ambivalence. ‘So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything,’ Lenfestey writes. ‘This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.’”
— LINDA PASTAN
“Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things: stories, images, metaphors, but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of ‘My Wife Sleeping as I Drive,’ Lenfestey writes: ‘We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue-black sky full / of oncoming lights and stars.’ How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!”
— JIM MOORE
“Think of Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. The lovers meet and marry; the children arrive and grow up. Along the way, there are days of joy and anxious nights, sweetness and humor. The narrator is a courageous ‘captain,’ an ‘old shepherd / exhausted with tending,’ and a ‘Marco Polo,’ but like his predecessors, he always returns to his center, his wife, who is (as he says) his life. What a fine tribute to fifty years of real-world love!”
— JOYCE SUTPHEN
“Lenfestey’s poems encircle a marriage while opening it out into the depths and heights with tenderness—I might say reverence—and grace. The poems move from outer rituals into the interior world of the self that wants to make sense of birth, joy, damage, death, and grief, but can’t, entirely. You want to know how it is to stay through the long haul? Look to these poems. ‘It is gravity, / which limits us totally, / which makes all life possible,’ Lenfestey writes. These are the poems of a brave heart and a skilled poet. They will make you want to kiss your sweetheart.”
— FLEDA BROWN
“I’ve been an avid reader of Lenfestey’s work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder, and so is his Marriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the ‘shared heat’ of love. This is, above all, a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, with Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read.”
— ROBERT HEDIN
“I just finished reading A Marriage Book straight through. Such a treasure. Virtuosic, with all the different moods and colors and shadings and statements and counterstatements, and so beautiful. A very wonderful book.”
— ELIZABETH GORDON MCKIM
“These generous poems, attractive in their emotional directness, confident in their subject matter, bring us into contact with the intimacies of an intensely lived life, insisting both on their frequent joys—there is playfulness, there is fervor—and on disclosing the vulnerabilities that demanding relationships reveal in us over the decades.”
— MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE
ALSO BY JAMES P. LENFESTEY
POETRY
Earth in Anger: Twenty-Five Poems of Love and Despair for Planet Earth
A Cartload of Scrolls: One Hundred Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan
Into the Goodhue County Jail: Poems to Free Prisoners
The Toothed and Clever World
Saying Grace
Odalisque
Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs (editor)
If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems (editor)
NONFICTION
The Urban Coyote: Howlings on Family, Community and the Search for Peace and Quiet
Robert Bly in This World (coeditor)
Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain
© 2017, Text by James P. Lenfestey
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
Published 2017 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Author photo by Larry Marcus
17 18 19 20 21 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lenfestey, James P., author.
Title: A marriage book / James P. Lenfestey.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions,
2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039309 | ISBN 9781571314925 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3612.E528 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039309
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. A Marriage Book was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Thomson-Shore.
for Susan
Contents
PROLOGUE
Who Would Believe
PART ONE: LIE LOVE EASY
Lie Love Easy
Aerie and High
Shared Heat
Woodsmoke and Perfume
To Make a Baby
An Engineering Problem
The Bath
After She Sleeps
Lunch-making
Saturday Night
Oh God, How Deep
They Will Have to Understand
Here, Take This Poem
Even as the Passion Cools
The Hand of God
PART TWO: SHE WHO THINKS LIKE A FISH THINKS
Self-Portrait: Newborn Father and Son
She Who Thinks Like a Fish Thinks
Learning to Speak Max
If We Were Bears
Singing the Babies to Sleep
Don’t Leave Albert Einstein with the Kids!
Monster at the Breakfast Table
When You Are Ready, Climb
Strawberries
Angel at Eighth-Grade Graduation
If You Become a Monk
To a Young Daughter
To My Daughter at Fourteen in the Aftermath of the First Full Moon
Driving Lesson: To My Son at Sixteen
Chores
Acres of Diamonds
Prayer
For a Rescued Daughter, an Artist, Coming Up for Air through Water
Backscratch Boy
A Wild Wood
Troubadour Song
Morning of the Wedding
Midnight Call
Christmas Prayer, Santa Fe, December 25, 1993
On a Youngest Daughter’s Acceptance at the College of Her Choice
On Course
Once in the Sixties
PART THREE: AND STILL SHE BLOOMS
In Her Garden, She
Two Knives
Fall Colors
Departure
Expedition Alone
Skin Like Botticelli’s Venus
My Wife Sleeping as I Drive
And Still She Blooms
At the Temple of Aphrodite
Swimming in the Sea of Time
New New Mexico Woman
You Know What I Know
The Poet Visits His Son, a Concert Promoter, and Attends a Michael Franti Concert
Dancing at Winter Solstice
Wild Swans Near Gladstone
Before the Grandchildren Arrive
Watching Gus Draw
End of Summer
A Mirror in Rome
Here Is My Promise to You, or Marco Polo Leaves the Kitchen for the Provinces
When I Am Eighty
EPILOGUE
Wedding Poem
Acknowledgments
In the final analysis, poets and novelists will have more to say about love than psychologists, for they express the inexpressible, and describe individual persons and their love problems, with their individual solutions and failures, and this is true to life and to eros.
John Sanford, The Invisible Partners
PROLOGUE
WHO WOULD BELIEVE
Even a good poet must be wary as a spider
offering a book of love poems
to the woman he married fifty years ago.
If he exaggerates his love, she’ll know.
If he denies it, she’ll devour him
while remembering her old dead lovers.
If he sands off the edge of his desire,
what’s the point?
And if his desire for her is undiminished,
who would believe?
PART ONE
Lie Love Easy
LIE LOVE EASY
pores, pouring, pouring over
lying under, lying, lie
stroke soft furry truths
in the lap
pet soft purring truths
in the lap
take a long time
jiggle hills easy
love time
gentle hills roll
lick your fur
lick your fur, cat
make a breeze
in the forest tangle
kiss the slick
leaves
one and one
become easy
ease away
the forest anger
lie love
please, no leaving
lie love easy
AERIE AND HIGH
I call to her from across
the room,
she hears hawks
high over rolling hills
we arc up, roll and join
and roll away,
high eyes glistening down
I brush her once here,
graze her once there,
she feels wings
I give her my licks of wing,
sharp flicks of talon,
my rough, cruel voice,
my down
we fall
we fall
we fall
toward that river
that soil
that call
Aerie and high
aerie and deep
we nest there
we nest there
and sleep.
SHARED HEAT
There is a certain hairy roughness
to overcome, I understand,
for me it is all easy,
like biting into warm
sour cream.
To touch, then
near sleep,
to fold together
like egg whites, like gears,
then sleep without touching,
sharing heat.
Shared heat.
Is this not the peace and comfort
of the species?
Why we gather under heavy
robes in winter?
Why we sew together
such huge quilts?
Roll apart, not touching
in the night sleep.
But never far,
never too far,
from the heat.
WOODSMOKE AND PERFUME
As a boy, there were
few women.
There was the woman
who smelled of woodsmoke
and the woman
who smelled of perfume.
There was the woman to be
danced with
for the last dance,
and the woman to walk home
holding her hand.
The woman who
wanted to be loved
and lay there,
and the
woman who wanted to love
and I lay there.
And the woman who said noc
while our minds went mad,
and the woman who said yes
who went mad.
And the woman who said no
who called and said yes
and the woman who went mad
who never called.
And then the woman
who said yes
and yes and again yes,
Yes.
TO MAKE A BABY
These days it takes courage.
No one has enough money.
Nobody has enough time.
No way is there enough room
in the house.
So you find yourself crowded
into that double bed.
And the kids are asleep.
The checkbook’s downstairs.
You bump into something warm.
And you find your courage rising.
AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM
What would you do?
I was asleep.
She tried to entice me.
She arched herself over me
like a pre-tensioned bridge beam.
The smooth arc of her calves
was enough to drive retired engineers
to recalculate fundamental forces—
the tensile strength of skin,
the compressive strength of thighs,
the pressure and flow dynamics of laying
mile after mile of pipe
underground.
Where do you get off? I inquired.
In the bathtub, she responded.
She asked me to join her.
But this groggy engineer
couldn’t do the calculations:
displacement, volume,
there’s no room for two
is all I could figure.
Don’t worry, she said,
we’ll work it out.
What would you do?
Here’s what I did.
I got up.
I wrote a poem.
While she soaked and softened,
I typed uncalculated lines
in my office next to the bathtub.
I could hear the water rustle
once, twice, a hundred times.
She entered my office from behind me
as I typed.
She wore a nightgown with pores of lace,
hair piled loosely, ringlets dipped
in water touching her neck.
She was warm and soft and groggy
as she hung her heavy arms around me.
“I love your poems,” she said.
We built a bridge.
THE BATH
I caught her as she slipped
into the tub.
She held him in her hands,
flushed and embarrassed.
Then settled
into the tendrils of steam
curling off the surface,
eyes heavy with his heft.
She ran her slick fingers up
and down his spine.
He’s deep, she said.
And endlessly fascinating.
And I love him, I love him.
My eyes burned through the water
toward the tangled story I call home.
But his chapters are long, she said.
And he’s such a fine . . . writer.
I stumbled to our bed, determined
to take matters into my own hands.
I reached for García Márquez
and was soon lost in tangled limbs
and the seduction of rivers.
I rolled and moaned