The pain it gave me gave you pain.
Roaring eighty miles an hour
over country roads. Exploded
vacation. Head to dash, clutch
my gut like a writhing fetus.
Close to labor as we’ll ever get.
Scatter parking gravel, huddled
to nurse and merciful shot. “Bad fish.”
We breathe and leave and twenty minutes
later you 911 a hospital as on a grass divider
again I roll in pain, helpless to help you

in yours. Five unrelieved hours.
Insurance-baffled, malpractice-defended
emergency room. Test after test.
No merciful shot. I twice ascend
from pain that night, looking down
on is that my body who are they.
You thunder my name, jerk me back.
“Help me, help me,” I whimper
again and again, torture
to you, but my sole comfort.
Somehow morning. Chilly doctor
shrugs, “Virus, maybe.” Bad fish bound
us in fear and sweat and threat, the nightmare night
we learned we cannot take away each other’s pain.

A canoe is a bad place
to fight we found out
early in our marriage
one long day on the Everglady waterways.

Our combined canoe experience
could have fit through the paddle-handle hole
but the moment we shove off
we are two experts. How to hold
the paddle, how to paddle when,
when to lean which way: certainties
opposed as stem and stern.

The romance of lovers
in loinclothy wilderness
rubs off like sunscreen in the sun.

The long boat horizontals down the flow,
past the other couple, embarrassing us both.
“That’s okay, you’ll get the hang of it!”
meant to comfort, irritates like grit.

“It’s not my fault,” the inner mutter.
Still, we’re being cordial with each other.
“Why not use your paddle like a rudder?”
The civil negative reply nettles
like a cinder in the eye.

We reach for deeper breaths. Aggravation
clots our throats like mangrove roots.
We chafe in hot silence.

The red stream widens,
quickens to rapids,
we quicken panic, paddle
cross-purposes, sidewinding
into bank branches, scrape
our faces, circle in the eddies,
stuck, stuck, stuck.

Anger raw as popping blisters.
No stomping off to different
rooms. The people with advice
have paddled off to Mexico by now.

Two furies with one awful thought:
Have I made a horrible mistake?
Linked my life with someone so
intractable and obstinate,
they cannot see when I am right?

Since that day, we’ve found
the paddling matters less
than the scenery, the scenery
matters less than the company.
All our fights take place
in a canoe. All our pleasures, too.

Soft warm Florida morning.
Drive for cinnamon rolls,
homemade by wintering Mennonites
in calico, bonnets, beards and brimhats.
Order at the counter in the white
shack, stand back. Fifty people,

waiting as they bake. Lush aroma.
In the gentle oven of the crowd, warming
with anticipation, in the pan of family:
mother, sister, sister’s son, (seeping
through the crowd like syrup)
you and I at once and wordless

turn and hold each other.
Your touch as yeast to me--
I open I expand I rise.
Soft selves joined and separate,
like two rolls baked together:
ordinary, fragrant, fulfilling.

You gave me, when we got engaged,
a ring of baby sapphires round a baby
diamond. A violet of gems. What came
over me? Bridal magazines? Lifelong sparkle
of my mother’s solitaire? I’d never cared
about a diamond ring, but now the icon
blinded. Discontent with sapphires and myself
for saying nothing would sneer forever
on this finger, so I feared. Begin marriage

honestly. I asked you to take it back.
Pick a single diamond. Its imagined dazzle
obscured your hurting face, hid your shame
returning what so glowingly you’d chosen.
(The American mistake, prizing symbols
over what they symbolize.) In the district,
we bought the diamond ring on the Monopoly
board from a man with a flesh-curdling twitch.

When your sapphire eyes sparkled joy tears
at our wedding, my ringfinger sizzled regret.
Although you never said a thing, each day
I saw the scar I gave you on my hand.
I apologized from time to time, making you return
that sapphire ring. One day, stupefying clemency.
Alone in a Bermuda shop, I gasp. Its perfect replica.
Later on the Moongate threshold, I present it to you.
Tears faceted your sapphire eyes again. Shortly
afterwards, to our great relief, my diamond ring--
prongs bent, stone cracked—was stolen.

“Go off,” I said. “Go heal.
Don’t tell me where you’re going
or when you’ll be back.
I’ll see you when I see you.”

This you loved. You left.
I spent my busy weeks alone,
wondered where in the world
you went, Germany maybe,

gone to your roots, I mused,
paging through my books. “Greece,”
you said when you returned,
radiant, telling of temples,

and cultural roots, a visit
to an island with my name,
and, oh, yes, mosaics.
“Mosaics!” I cried, and I ran

for my book. “I’ve been studying
them for the last couple days!”
A bookmark stuck where the finest
were. “My favorites,” I showed you.

You drew a sharp breath
and your palm struck your chest.
“I was in this church two days ago.”

When we forget the mortar
that holds the image so, we never
know the knowing that we know.