louis brodsky

Saving the Marriage


There are seasons in hell
When a man must take leave of his senses,
Abandon sanity and reason,
Retreat from the rubble heap of troubled dreams
That, collapsing about his feet,
Strand him standing in sand,
Like Ozymandias,
Silent in his disillusionment.

Where he'll go to take refuge,
He never knows until the moment he arrives.
Right now, all he can recall
About getting here
Is crying to his wife, in pained falsetto,
"I'll love you, always!"
As she stole his balls
And he fell through a hole in his soul.

Today, no mention is ever made
Of his ephemeral hiatus.
He and she seem exemplary mates,
Model spouses, who share housekeeping
And raising a perfectly matched set of children.
They take vacations regularly,
Embrace, kiss, hug in public,
And never make love making love.


Louis Daniel Brodsky, born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., Magna Cum Laude, at Yale University, in 1963, he received an M.A. in English at Washington University, in 1967, and an M.A. in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, in 1968. Brodsky is the author of fifty-eight volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-three volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and seven books of short fictions.