What Didn't Save the Marriage

Three palm trees edging
a Florida bay, irises I planted, now a snarl
in Tennessee, the Maryland kitchen with its lazy
susan spices, a feral cat who materialized
only for us no matter where we lived.
The pig plate that’s followed me even to this house
hung above the sink like an admonition.
Your grandmother’s nigella satvia reseeding,
the lace of its beseeching, twisting tendrils,
oil from its black seeds allegedly a cure
for everything but death.

My mother tipsy standing closer than you
as we said homemade vows on the brink
of the overlook. Earrings I fashioned
from polymer clay in the shapes
of a penis and vagina.  My manic brother
saying he’d kill you if you hurt me,
a philosopher who blessed us in his house
full of hummingbirds, toucans, and dinosaur dung.

I couldn’t hike behind those falls, afraid
of the unbroken roar of what had just been ice.
Potted Christmas trees with artisanal 
ornaments your mother bribed me with—
the row of evergreen children they made
on the back lot with the crooked dogwood
your dad dug up from the hillside. Time
near the end when you wrote an essay
to change my mind, even after I’d smashed it.