usufruct

They’re playing it again on the drive home,

the pharmacy, the gas pump, the tinny

overhead speaker in the Kroger while I stand

holding a carton of eggs like evidence:

that voice, that name, my name,

four times, the way you always said it,

like a woman calling a dog that already ran.

So you’re gone. Fine. I should feel

something clean about it — the thing

you pinned on me in ’73

finally falling off me for good —

except you never spelled out what I did.

you accused me of nothing. You accused me of maybe.

Of a smile you decided about.

Emerald eyes, ivory skin, the auburn hair:

you drew me gorgeous and gave me no mouth.

I don’t own a bit of it. Not the hair,

not the fame, not the name your fear made famous.

I only hold the use of it, the way

a tenant holds a house — all of it mine,

none of it mine, the deed still in your hand.

And him? The man I was going to take:

he’d gone on ahead of you already.

There was never anyone to steal.

Just you, awake at 2 a.m., certain,

writing a stranger into the shape of a wound.

You made it to eighty. You got the long

slow honest business of a face

coming apart in the mirror — the mercy

of that. I don’t age. I can’t.

I’m exactly as dangerous as the night

you wrote me: flaming, plainly a threat,

young the way only the invented stay young.

And now — god — now there’s no one left

who’s afraid of me.

You were the only one

who ever looked that hard, who said my name

like it could ruin you, who lay there

and made me the most important woman

in a marriage I was never in.

You feared me the way most people

never once get loved.

So go. I’ll stand in the frozen food aisle

and let the song play out, and when it does,

the store’ll go quiet, the eggs still in my hands,

and I’ll be nobody’s Jolene at all —

just a word that used to make a good woman

beg.

beg.

beg.

beg.