MARRIAGE

There's always something like a feather
in the updraft

something like a lost kite—

in the air shaft—

It's not like marching down the road
It's not like marching down the road

going away from something
going towards something

It's not that the two of us are the same height—
Salt—
Pepper—

It's more like gravity

mass

a kind of involuntary

relief—

Ann Killough has been married for a sufficiently long time to be something of an expert, at least on her own marriage. Actually she is something of an expert on many aspects of her own life and is not at all demented. Her ancestors were slaveowners, but that fact no longer worries her or even enters her consciousness, which is too full of various kinds of personal expertise. She is a good person. She is a poet, which is the same thing as a Messenger of the Lord or a Vine in the Forest of History. She is also an MFA student, a fact she tends not to publicize because it is sort of anticlimactic...