Judith Roche is the author of three collections of poetry, Wisdom of the Body,  which won an American Book Award, Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer and Ghosts, is co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, also an American Book Award recipient. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies and has worked in collaboration with visual artists on several public art projects which are installed in the Northwest area. She is Literary Arts Director Emeritus for One Reel, an arts producing company, and teaches poetry workshops. She was Distinguished Northwest Writer in Residence at Seattle University in 2007 and is a Fellow in the Black Earth Institute.

The Husbands 

I married them for all the wrong reasons.
One for sex, another for a boat,
though the boat wasn’t for me
but for the son left behind
from the sex I married the first one for.
But it was the daughter I carried inside
when I married the first one.
There were others but they
didn’t quite count as husbands.

The third I didn’t even marry.
He read me poems in bed
and left little behind, nothing of any value.
But the pain turned out about the same.
And then there was my daughter,
steady, there through all of it,
watching me with blue owl eyes,
thinking, is this the way you do it?

We had boat enough to teach us
of the sea, the beauty of fish,
the son’s love for water.
The first left me my daughter and my son,
both, my dawn, noon, sunset, and night.

The husbands are all far away now,
two into that great good night–
strange to have outlived them.
The third, off in his own mysteries.
They surface in my dreams,
sometimes even the others join in,
as lions, as kings, as husbands.
They all blend together, vivid,
purring loudly and shape-shifting.
I love them – or him –
the one Great Husband,
for whom
I am still a wife.

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Copyright 2007, Judith Roche.
 All Rights Reserved by Author.