Let the people who never find true love
keep saying there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.  Wislawa Szmborska

Dishes undone, floors unswept, beds uncovered
YOU’D BETTER GET IT TOGETHER she says
WOMEN ARE ABOUT READY TO TAKE OVER.
I hang at the kitchen door.  It pleases

me not to be in the path of her dissent:
the loan company will talk only to me
their envelopes always addressed to me
though it was she who, in such discontent,

took the cell to yell and get the lower rate;
their anachronistic forms out of space
for my female partner who’s toting the bill.

I decide it’s all best left unsaid when
she goes with the anger to her back garden,
a place of butterflies and comfrey