Bundschuh, Jessica Grant: What is as wrong as the uninstructed heart...

“What is as wrong as the uninstructed heart?”
after William Meredith
   

I knew a woman who, unable to sleep, 
knowing blindness was approaching, 
chose to listen to the tongue of her heart: 
         Go now, on your own.
She'd known herself one way for years, 
and couldn't meet herself now anew.

She did not coax a snake to bite her ankle,
but mixed herself a cocktail, tainted, in the garage…
(How long she had planned it no one knew.)
She must have leaned against the wall until she was
so weak she could hardly stand, or see, or hear…
Finally, she rang her own doorbell, falling when 
her husband arrived as though for a package 
or a neighbor, not for a wife dying.

There was no stopping the momentum now,
as she had intended, enclosed by the path 
to the mail box, and the irises which breathed 
and breathed on all sides of this old pair,
holding each other so tightly, he felt 
they lifted off the ground… He knew then — 
The forces of nature were surely to blame! 
And what made it more obscene 
was that he could not look away, even 
as his wife faded in his arms. He clasped 
her hands to his mouth, kissing her palms, 
transfixed by a mark he imagined
lay somewhere on her skin. How could she commit
her independence — ?
There was no repair. The sting remained, 
and the husband knew that he —
his passions — He could clutch them tighter —
And he could never let some spot in his heart
remain there permanently…