Tinker Bell & My Husband

Of all the times I wished you would die quick,

my despair ballooning like a cartoon

bubble (but kept inside my face—tamped down

so you wouldn’t notice) the worst

was when you’d sit in your chair reading,

glasses sliding down your nose. I cursed you then,

you looked so ordinary! Feeding your mind

with print, the light dimming around a sick

man in a velvet chair with a book, legs

crossed. My mind would snap to stage lights dimming

on the first play I ever saw: the time it took,

the ex-x-cruciating time in the too-big velvet seat

it took to see, through the dead dark quiet of all

the children, the tiny flicker of the spotlight

that was supposed to be Tinker Bell

dying.

            An adult voice came over telling us all

to shout, “Live!” and we did, and Tinker flickered,

so the voice said, “louder.” We yelled: she came alive.

But she was just a light standing in for a little being,

as tiny in all the universe as you were in your chair,

under a reading lamp, the circle of light closing

on the glare of current events—wasting

in the modern way of velvety agony.

I almost heard myself say, “louder.”

When the matinee was all over, the actors

assembled in a garish beam

(the house lights were up), all the characters

except Tinker. Tinker Bell wasn’t there,

even though we’d yelled, “Live!”

She wasn’t acted. She was electricity—

a current a stagehand had turned off.