Divorce Song
A man who is probably my husband sails by.
But I just see a sailboat, not who steers it.
But I picture a man, in the gender of things.
My husband who you will not meet.
He’s off, I don’t know, marshalling.
Ideas, not soldiers. Sailing helps him think.
I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly
decorative, a mermaid on the prow.
Whether I brought him better luck
is not my weather to tell. I cost him.
Time. He costs me. More.
Copyright © 2022 by Jameson Fitzpatrick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This is an excerpt from a book-length riff on Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. The opera’s protagonist, a married noblewoman in eighteenth-century Vienna known as the Marschallin, finds herself facing both the end of an affair and the end of her youth. As I approached the latter juncture myself and decided to transition, she became an unlikely source of solace. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet who penned the libretto, also wrote some thirteen-line terza rimas, which the form of this poem gestures towards. ‘The gender of things’ is cribbed from Anne Sexton’s ‘Consorting with Angels’; the title, from a track on Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville.”
—Jameson Fitzpatrick
Jameson Fitzpatrick
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020). A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA fellow in poetry, she is a clinical associate professor in the expository writing program at New York University.