My dear Martha, I had a paper route. And a change maker fastened to my belt. My dear Martha, I say with a syrupy lilt (although I allow my fork to clatter), my dear Martha, grow—flow—flourish. I used to let the nickels drop. Snick snick two pennies snick a nickel snick a dime. My dear. Longer ago than that, it seems, I looked on your face with fascination. Now I see in you what you see in me. The quarter: I never had too many of those. Snick a penny. I do the dishes in this house and so I care about the cleanliness of tines. I also put the pitchfork in the earth. I hoe. I rake. You cut. You trim. You train. You snick. I clear away the vines. The good old days. I wonder would one of them hold me. Click. Smick. The once fine times. I sold the Journal door to door. Liberty. The American magazine. My dear, you already fill each tiny crawl and cranny of my life as though you were sweetly reconditioned air. Her rich lips quiver slightly. It’s a little late to pay attention to the kids, but you might at least learn to drive the car. (As if I didn’t know how to drive a car.) I remember protesting that there were too many Jews. Ah, Kohler—Tabor touches his trousers—there are too many Hindoos. Birth has always been the bane of bodily existence. And here I am entering fifty as though it were the outskirts of Moline. I lift my fork in salute but observe it covered with yolk. Still, there are so many things I might in my general lateness learn: how to wiggle my middle finger on the sounding string. I would pedal my bike over half the town trying to collect. My customers were crooks. With my past safely past me, I could scale mountainous sums to look on numbers formerly beyond expression. All those free reads, though. In the American a feature-length mystery every month. I’d like to learn to weave rugs whose mystical designs would snare the shoe. So many magics remain, my dear; there is so much to feel and see and do—to move and shake—accomplish and perform—there is always a forelock left by which to take Time; and where simple things have gone quite plainly wrong, there is the opportunity to make long, incomprehensible repairs. Our breakfast cloth is sticky with honey rings. I stroll my eyes like a pair of poodles from pale blue square to square until I reach the milk. She knows that I’ll drink nothing held in place by cardboard ballyhoo and boozle wax, but she carries carton after carton in the house

as if our kids were still kids

and lived with us like pampered cats

ate graham crackers after school,

licked jelly off of jellied fingers,

and wore mustaches made of milk

to sour slowly in the fridge and slip like vomit down the sink. Left hand in her lap . . . I reach the precipice . . . is she wearing hers, or am I to infer that a restless and rebellious soul struts and frets behind the curtain of her flesh this morning? When she’s fed up with cooking for me she will leave her rings in a clutter by the stove, together on her bedside table as a warning not to touch, or on the lid of a can of scouring powder so to say, “I shall not scrub,” and when she does her face she drops them in a dish of slid-out soap because she’d forsake her mirrored visage too, the girlish blond plumpness gone, the long braids gray. The diaphragm she inserted last night in a spirit of pure speculation (I smelled the jelly on her fingers as her torso turned like a roll of snow from the center of our marriage to the bed’s left edge)—has it been removed? Likewise, the first furnace this house had is still in dust and ash down there, left over, abandoned in a corner of the cellar