The Number Tow

Wendy Vardaman
    I broke
    my mother’s heart when I broke
    it off with the first
    man I planned to marry, just
    what she’d have wanted in a husband: steady-as-a-pump, dependable,
    professional. He designed industrial—and it sounds a little
    more romantic and less ironic to me now
    than it did then—pumps. Knew
    all about flow and circulation,
    could describe precisely through equation
    the things I’ve spent
     
    the intervening years attempting to apprehend
    through language and line,
    hurling one
    word against another,
    to hear
    them slap, crack, crash, strike jagged rock
    crouched just below a dark,
    and you knew this already, deceptive
    surface, varying with each toss the frequency, period, depth:
    lines like water rushing forward in multi-syllabic waves, then slowing
    to crawl, a crab moving
     
    against the inevitable:
    the tide of maternal desire, the pull
    of the number tow within my own divided
    mind.
    The lack of ease
    with which I swim. And always
    the contest between lungs given to giving
    out at the precise moment when surfacing
    for breath brings a blow to the head,
    the incalculable weight of something that should not really be solid
    breaking against you, the rush of liquid into the gap of insubstantiality, an empty
     
    set you can’t sustain. This was supposed to be about my mother: about how
    you can’t control your child’s heart
    no matter how you want
    to, or what you think’s best,
    and how I came to find that out,
    and how my ex- had a few rocks lurking
    beneath that placid surface, but like every breathing thing,
    it has its own
    life, and seems, if I had to say, to be about the imagination
    or epistemology, instead,
    and, as always, my own rocky romance with God.
     

    --published in Obstructed View (Fireweed Press, 2009)
     

    
Wendy Vardaman - Wendy Vardaman, has a Ph.D. in English from University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University. Co-editor of Verse Wisconsin, her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. She lives in Madison, WI with husband, Thomas DuBois, has three children, and works for the children’s theater company, The Young Shakespeare Players Tags: Thanal Online, web magazine dedicated for poetry and literature Wendy Vardaman, The Number Tow
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