Poetry · The Effectual Marriage

The Effectual Marriage

Or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni

The door was an absurd thing

Yet it was passable

They quotidienly passed through it

It was this shape

Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows

They knew it was important to them

This being of who they were

They were themselves

Corporeally transcendentally consecutively

conjunctively and they were quite complete

In the evening they looked out of their two windows

Miovanni out of his library window

Gina from the kitchen window

From among his pots and pans

Where he so kindly kept her

Where she so wisely busied herself

Pots and Pans she cooked in them

All sorts of sialagogues

Some say that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her

Gina being a female

But she was more than that

Being an incipience a correlative

an instigation of the reaction of man

From the palpable to the transcendent

Mollescent irritant of his fantasy

Gina had her use Being useful

contentedly conscious

She flowered in Empyrean

From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor

From the gritty road on the white wall

anybody could see it

Shimmered a composite effigy

Madonna crinolined a man

hidden beneath her hoop

Ho for the blue and red of her

The silent eyelids of her

The shiny smile of her

Ding dong said the bell

Miovanni Gina called

Would it be fitting for you to tell

the time for supper

Pooh said Miovanni I am

Outside time and space

Patience said Gina is an attribute

And she learned at any hour to offer

The dish appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego

In his library

What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans

One never asked the other

So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace

Of what their peace consisted

We cannot say

Only that he was magnificently man

She insignificantly a woman who understood

Understanding what is that

To Each his entity to others

their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion

to the annexed their liberty

To man his work

To woman her love

Succulent meals and an occasional caress

So be it

It so seldom is

While Miovanni thought alone in the dark

Gina supposed that peeping she might see

A round light shining where his mind was

She never opened the door

Fearing that this might blind her

Or even

That she should see Nothing at all

So while he thought

She hung out of the window

Watching for falling stars

And when a star fell

She wished that still

Miovanni would love her to-morrow

And as Miovanni

Never gave any heed to the matter

He did

Gina was a woman

Who wanted everything

To be everything in woman

Everything everyway at once

Diurnally variegate

Miovanni always knew her

She was Gina

Gina who lent monogamy

With her fluctuant aspirations

A changeant consistency

Unexpected intangibilities

Miovanni remained

Monumentally the same

The same Miovanni

If he had become anything else

Gina’s world would have been at an end

Gina with no axis to revolve on

Must have dwindled to a full stop

In the mornings she dropped

Cool crystals

Through devotional fingers

Saccharine for his cup

And marketed

With a Basket

Trimmed with a red flannel flower

When she was lazy

She wrote a poem on the milk bill

The first strophe Good morning

The second Good night

Something not too difficult to

Learn by heart

The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table

Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board

The coloured vegetables

Intuited quality of flour

Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal

Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses

Pet simplicities of her Universe

Where circles were only round

Having no vices.