The Kaplan Version

 A privy of poets is over to tea.  Elizabeth carves her name in stone and announces she loves me.  Years of bad choices, sick marriages and desperate nights made such recklessness familiar.  But had she truly unlocked herself from her past?  Is she to be trusted with a midnight confession?  Or is she to be resisted like a tempting offer of freedom that will not pay off?

She and I are too firm in our ways.  Yes.  We must have a talk.  Yet I find myself counting the drops of mist on the screen door, conscious and apart, while she beckons to me from the beach.  And surely that must be part of a pattern: I conditional, she convinced.  Her will to triumph is evidenced in the poems of hers I cannot bear to read.  Can the hidden dangers of her past be erased by enthrallment with her potential?

But what has Elizabeth done exactly?  Her education is riddled with misconceptions.  Her clothes are shabby and without style, her face deliriously asymmetrical.  She laughs with ease.  Her language is Ethiopian or might as well be.  She spread her arms to me that first time:  a bird ascending from water. I have never seen anyone looking so morbid and clumsy while feeling so buoyant and proud.  But she has not been defiled, not ever.  Her conscience is as clear as her cheeks are luminous, as her upper lips fans out like a panther’s.  She has hennaed her hair and delighted in the way it dances in the fog.
       

My trouble is that I am disengaged from my roots.  I have difficulty remembering my obligations.  Also, certain bodily functions have me stymied.  Who do I think I am? I think I shall never be a papa.  My own papa hugs himself to sleep, glad.
       

I loved her looks which was mistake number one.  Look, I’d been around. I’d traveled, farther than near, and looked into the obliquities of civilizations.  I’d faced sleeping tigers, confronted elephants (that is, approached them from one side or the other or the rear), smelled heels burning on the ghats, heard the hwhut! of long distance stabbings.
       

But I never lived her moments of peace, only gazed at them from behind brown eyes. She walks slowly, stoops, piles pebbles just so, just right.  And I resist mightily, as if to do less would be the abdication of free choice.
       

…to accept the intensity of her heart, her pawing at the sky, to give into my midnight desire and wear her red silk shoes.  And delight in the way my beard dances in the fog whether I know the dance or not.  Whether I follow her or not.
       

And at last, and before I read all her poems, I will tell her the ways I love her.

Bio: Barry Jay Kaplan’s stories have appeared in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Storyglossia, Brink, Perigee, Amarillo Bay, Eclectica, Journal of Truth & Consequences, Nth Position, LitnImage, tobybashi, Prick of the Spindle, Twist of Noir, 971 Menu, Oxford Magazine, Apple Valley Review (Pushcart Prize nominee).  "His Wife" is part of Best of the Net Anthology 2008.