Strangers and Wives

I wake up with her, check myself, eyes creaking like blind stars. She’s strange, she’s yesterday, I remember us the week before; wonder if tomorrow will fade us both out completely. We don’t get to know them - the wives I mean. Living together we grow too myopically tangled, and the vows, the wild love with a facsimilia of what we thought they were, the sharing of a frowsy bed, a grody toilet, the live-in tales of indifferent playwrights. We forget to know them and forget that we never really did. An ex-wife chides me in my sleep now, but occasionally I dream of erotic sex with her. If she had not assumed that she knew me well, we might be still turning around a togetherness like hands on a clock, instead of just doing this body-mike thing to each other. I am up making coffee. She comes into the kitchen deliberately brushing her hip against mine…nothing strange about that, but I do wonder if sometimes she thinks I am someone else.