The Bad Wife Handbook. Rachel Zucker

      

       The Bad Wife Handbook

       The Bad Wife Handbook

      Rachel Zucker

      WESLEYAN POETRY

      Wesleyan University Press

      MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

      Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      © 2007 by Rachel Zucker

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America

      5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Zucker, Rachel.

      The bad wife handbook / Rachel Zucker.

      p. cm. -- (Wesleyan poetry)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)

      ISBN-10: 0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)

      I. Title.

      PS3626.U26B33 2007

      811’.6--dc222007019778

      “Cover photograph by Celeste Fichter.”

       In spite of & because,Joshua Goren

      Contents

       Monogamist 3

       The Museum of Accidents 4

       Codary 5

       The Secret Room 6

       Firmament 7

       Monogamist 8

       Galaxies Rushing Away 9

       Axon, Dendrite, Rain 10

       Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker 11

       Hermeneutic 12

       The Tell 13

       Where I Went Instead of Paris 14

       Wife, Wife, Duck 15

       It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon 16

       Alluvial 17

       Monogamist 18

       My Beautiful Wickedness 19

       Floating Wick in Petrol 20

       Bridle 21

       Thought, Antithoughts 22

       Sex 23

       What Is Not Science is Art is Nature 24

       Freud Had Sex but Jung Had God 26

       Squirrel in a Palm Tree 31

       Annunciation 51

       The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma 71

       Autographies 89

       Acknowledgments, Dedications, and Notes 113

      … synonyms do not exist.

      —Donald Hall

       Monogamist

      A human being can’t compare

      size and brightness

      on two occasions. So we say

      the moon has a dark side.

      We say the tide twice a day. I say that man there, so unlike

      my husband.

       The Museum of Accidents

      The school girl’s tights speckle

      in the rain. In the city

      the sparrow on sparrow feet skips

      across my path, legs invisible.

      We are bound. Similar,

      indistinct forms called bodies,

      our Milky Way’s spiral arms—

      stars, nebulae, matter—

      bound

      to great disaster.

       Codary

      Once he was a type, kind, tide,

      but became a singularity.

      I stopped breathing.

      Where the husband’s orbit overlaps: darkness.

      No light can be shed on what lies beyond this

      gravitational sheer,

      harsh polarity

      of wanting.