Love Story Series

Shoshauna Shy and husband Jim 

 

 

Portrait of a Long Marriage

 By Shoshauna Shy

 

I met my to-be husband, Jim, when I was 23. He was moving into a house I was moving out of, so I stayed. In essence, he took up residence on Sunday, April 1st, 1978 during a soggy snowstorm, started giving me driving lessons on Wednesday, took me on a "date" Thursday, then we slept together Friday. We've been together ever since.

We got married May 3, 1980 at the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin.

After we announced our engagement, my father painted this portrait of us as an engagement present.

 

SECRET TO A LONG MARRIAGE

Leaving Home Depot
with a light fixture
for our kitchen

        he cracks what he calls
        one of my stupid jokes

and even after we cross
the parking lot
I still cannot stop laughing

----This poem will be on the back of our headstone

You know how your spouse tells you all about their wild adventures as a teenager before you knew them?  

PASS THE SYRUP

Let me thank Vincent Hahn
for not holding the wheel
at a diagonal
that night he drank six shots of Tequila
and took my fiancée-to-be
down County Trunk Q

    because when he clipped the stop sign
    at Rory Road
    and the dang thing soared
    three inches above his Mustang convertible

I got to hear how it flew perfectly parallel
over the pancakes
of a married morning

from What the Postcard Didn’t Say
 

 

IF YOU THINK GETTING
ASKED OUT ON A SECOND DATE
IS THRILLING PROOF THAT YOU’RE LOVED

it’s nothing like when
after your sixteen-thousand-four-
hundred and eighty-seventh night
together in the same bed

your husband invites you
to go on a morning walk with him
 

  

 

KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW NOW

would you have left
the window painted shut
had it been clear it would matter
that my mother could

    buy a house because it’s purple so-what-the-ceiling’s-caving-in
    Believe life imitates art and not the other way around
    Let the wind rake the lawn while she paints the trees

In this same way
had I been familiar with

    your father’s scorn for what has no practical function
    His reflex to shear whatever’s frayed
    His conviction that hard work is all we’re here for

would I have shoved my boat from shore?

On our most despondent days
ours is a marriage between

your father
my mother
 

 

AT THE RACES

A sister penned a plea
you not promote me to bride,
did not wager this would happen

regardless, that I’d never manage
to forget the color of that ink.
Another sister banked on odds

we’d succumb to one of The Three D’s:
Depression --- Desertion  --- Divorce,
get throttled from domestic bliss

like a jockey at the track where
Romance is saddled by Mortgage
Mountain, overtaken by Baby Blues,

trumped by Adultery.  Children now
raised, properties paid off, we continue,
despite some stutters and stalls,

sailing full gallop at the clubhouse
turn, our calloused hands not raw
from rope-burn; our ragged sleep

not soured by revenge; we are not
exhausted ex-spouses riddled
with regret, holiday-tortured.

Notes of discord, what can’t be
shared pales in importance to gentle
harmony, something cultivated three

decades in the running partly due
to betting on the right horse
the right time, so call this relief

that kindles our laughter:
Countless ways to lose outright
and we outran them all.