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A Pause in Our Divorce
Tomorrow, we start again,
those leaflets on the blood of the lamb
swirling about my blockade of shot glasses.
Like a coffin with its lid kicked open,
our trailer will shake
when I blast out the door,
stuffed tigers tumbling from crooked shelves
to claw the carpet bought at Goodwill.
Apple tea in hand,
you will watch me tramp that gravel path
smeared with snow, my breath
a fist trembling open
once my back’s to you. But tonight
is a butterfly on our bayonet,
you in the rocker, wet black hair hanging
like a nun’s habit; and me wedged
in the easy chair, a whiskey-stained Othello
in my lap. We wonder how we’ll end,
like those enemy soldiers in World War I
who played football in no man’s land before Verdun.
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J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. After a life spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And for the Mouth a Flower, What the Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World at Hand.
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A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce