Final Chapters


Because he wrote we would have a good life,
make babies, be close
after that chaos called Nam,
I believed our walk through that Pearl Harbor
arch of swords meant that he loved me.

His abandonment came as a surprise. 
Not physical abandonment.
That would've been easier.
No, it was the way his eyes glazed
during our short times together,
how he hoarded his emotions carefully,
parceling them out like a child of the Depression,
so fearful of losing everything, might do.

I thought it was Nam.
Part of it was.
Part was just him.

After five years stuck in that cramped hole in my life, 
I left, 
but those days of Hawaiian leis
slung 'round my neck,
surf rising high over my feet,
the laughter of friends and sheer happiness
over times that would never again come
in quite that same way, skewered me,
held me tight through my next love,
then the next.

Should I have left?
Should I go back?

He sometimes hinted at my return.

Doubt tightened his hold, burning the shadow
of those swords across every footstep, slowing and confusing me.

He eventually remarried,
was silent for a long time.

Last week he wrote.
He spoke of my sweet bush, my tight ass,
how hard he still got just imagining it.
My ass has fallen miles from his dream ass.
That ass belonged to a fantasy of the woman I once was, 
just as those letters sent from that ship
bound for Nam were a fantasy of the woman
he left behind, not the woman he eventually
would come home to.

He loved who lived in his mind,
not in his eyesight.

Something released with that realization
and the skewer slid free. 

Now I wonder how my heart kept on beating 
for so many years with it stuck there.

Pris Campbell
©2007

photo: from the archives

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