Unspeakable

Now I come to look at love in a new way, now that I know I'm not standing in its light. I want to ask my almost-no-longer husband what it's like to not love, but he does not want to talk about it, he wants a stillness at the end of it. And sometimes I feel as if, already, I am not here-to stand in his thirty-year sight, and not in love's sight, I feel an invisibility like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long accelerator, where what cannot be seen is inferred by what the visible does. After the alarm goes off, I stroke him, my hand feels like a singer who sings along him, as if it is his flesh that's singing, in its full range, tenor of the higher vertebrae, baritone, bass, contrabass. I want to say to him, now, What was it like, to love me-when you looked at me, what did you see? When he loved me, I looked out at the world as if from inside a profound dwelling, like a burrow, or a well, I'd gaze up, at noon, and see Orion shining-when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath's time, but for the long continuance, the hard candies of femur and stone, the fastnesses. He shows no anger, I show no anger but in flashes of humor, all is courtesy and horror. And after the first minute, when I say, Is this about her, and he says, No, it's about you, we do not speak of her.