Deborah Guzzi

Comrades In Arms

In the refrigerated coldness of a courtroom sitting with my truest friend near me, boxed in by bureaucracy who cared not for the long, lingering years of marital decline. The unyielding forms of squares and rectangles, benched, tabled and chaired the end of a lifetime of intercourse. Only one friend had come to my Golgotha, my place of skulls.

a downcast woman
sat before a solemn judge –
the gravel falls

Sedated with mother's little helpers, we sat, she and I, attempting through chemistry and kindness to bar the pain of memory. No sour wine laced with myrrh for me. The Judge seeing no sense in the dissolution of a union three decades in the baking, washed his hands of us, my husband and me, like Pilate. As the crown of thorns had encircled the pate of HIM, so had the bands of marriage encased us, frozen, dead, in the honey colored amber ... of we.