THE FIGHT
On the third day of the fight
that had begun over an apostrophe,
it was night in the room, he came in
dripping rain and not looking at me,
and we sat on the couch a long time
in the seventh month of our marriage,
and I had wanted to believe
some basic things about marriage—
not that it was a guarantee
but that it might at least increase the probability of
not being left, and that this other creature,
though also wracked, might spare me
a particular terror, an infinite terror: of un-
tetheredness. Think of the universe
expanding, which means stepping outside
itself, but outside is only
more it. You can see how those Iberians a few centuries ago,
for example, would rather watch a human burn,
twisting candlewick, than wander through the dark reaches
of starry shapelessness. Where is the Hand on the Head? Where is
the Container of the 56 celestial spheres? So when he said
he didn't love me, and I sat beside him in the dark,
and my throat and lungs produced the howls like a dog's howls,
it wasn't about love, because how do I know what love is? it was
that he had put his fist through the surface of the skies.
And after that, nothing happened.
— Sharon Kraus
Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig
on an improbable branch
of a contingent limb
on a fortunate tree.
~ Stephen Jay Gould
Love/Life Poems
