He would laugh a laugh almost of dis-
belief, sometimes, during the months

he was leaving me, before anyone knew, there was a
lightness in his laugh, a reprieve.  I asked him

to go with me to someone to help us

do this with less horror and shock,
he could not -- and it was irrevocable, still,
my vision of him as a kind man, of his

body as the body of a gentleman,
gentryman who would always keep
his word to another gentryman,
I could not dare to know he was not
extra good, magic good,
I could not afford in my moral purse
to know this man -- whose story, then, was joy
and breakthrough at last.  I did not so much
swallow it as promulgate
and prorogate, conceive and gestate,
I’d always wanted to be married to someone extra-
special, and so I was, because

I said I was, so it was someone extra-
special tearing the home, room
from room, in quiet non-unsmilingness.
And then in the months that followed his departure
I dreamed by the window, I drifted, a diver
beside the empty pool she had seen
as full.  And I went a little crazy, and started
multiplying -- say twice a week, and
once or twice a day in August,
for thirty-two years, and each time
five, or seven, or what, makes how many
hundred thousand orgasms with this
gentleman I did not know, who,
maybe, knew me better than I knew
myself, knew my greed and my
arithmetic.  And at last a workaday
god of love came, and put
her palm on my forehead, and said, Go
lie down, I’ll do your bathrooms tonight
along of mine, you poor spoiled creature.