The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
–Jeremiah

The children having grown up and moved away,
One day she announced in brisk and scathing terms
That since for lo, as she said, these many years
She had thanklessly worked her fingers to the bone,
Always put him and the children first and foremost,
(A point he thought perhaps disputable)
She had had it up to here, and would be leaving
The following day, would send him an address
To which her belongings could be forwarded
And to which her monthly payments could be sent.
He could see her point. It was only tit for tat.
After all the years when the monthly pains were hers
They now were to be his. True to her word,
Which she commanded him to mark, she packed
And left, and took up shifting residence,
First with a barber, then with a state trooper:
From the scissors of severance to the leather holster
Of the well-slung groin– the six-pack, six-gun weapon
Of death and generation. He could see the point.
In these years of inflation ways and means
Had become meaner and more chancy ways
Of getting along. Economy itself
Urged perfect strangers to bed down together
Simply to make ends meet, and so ends met.
Rather to his surprise, his first reaction
Was a keen sense of relief and liberation.
It seemed that, thinking of her, he could recall
Only a catalogue of pettiness,
Selfishness, spite, a niggling litany
Of minor acrimony, punctuated
By outbursts of hysteria and violence.
Now there was peace, the balm of Gilead,
At least at first. Slowly it dawned upon him
That she had no incentive to remarry,
Since, by remaining single and shacking up,
She would enjoy two sources of income.
In the house of her deferred and mortgaged dreams
Two lived cheaply as one, if both had funds.
He thought about this off and on for years
As he went on subsidizing her betrayal
In meek obedience to the court decree,
And watered the flowers by his chain-link fence
Beside the railroad tracks. In his back yard
He kept petunias in a wooden tub
Inside the white-washed tire of a tractor trailer,
And his kitchen steps of loose, unpainted boards
Afforded him an unimpeded view
Of the webbed laundry lines of all his neighbors,
Rusted petroleum tins, the buckled wheels
Of abandoned baby-carriages, and the black-
Sooted I-beams and girders of a bridge
Between two walls of rusticated stonework
Through which the six-fifteen conveyed the lucky
And favored to superior destinies.
Where did they go, these fortunates? He’d seen
Blonde, leggy girls pouting invitingly
In low-cut blouses on TV commercials,
And thought about encountering such a one
In a drugstore or supermarket. She
Would smile (according to his dream scenario)
And come straight home with him as if by instinct.
But in the end, he knew, this would be foreplay
To the main event when she’d take him to the cleaners.