Vox Populi
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Beth Copeland: Second Wife
Fifteen years ago I drove south to see you as trees broke
into bloom—redbuds, pears, dogwoods—and my heart
unfolded like a bud closed too long in the cold.
Later, I moved into the log cabin built when you were
still married to a woman with chestnut hair that spilled
around her shoulders while she knelt in the dirt as if in
prayer, planting dozens of bulbs on the edge of woods.
Sometimes I wished we didn’t live where her daffodils
burst yellow and green—worthy of Wordsworth’s ode—
along a ditch beside the gravel road, reminders of the life
you’d shared with her. I wished I’d never seen the wooden
box with recipes written in her hand on faded index cards—
Tomato and Basil Rigatoni, Amish Bread, Blueberry Cobbler—
and the wedding photographs stashed face-down in the drawer
of a bedside chest. I wished you’d never told me about the rugs
she wove on a loom in our bedroom. I wished she hadn’t left
that green, down-filled vest from L.L. Bean in the hall closet.
It’s not my style, I said when you offered it to me. It looks
like a life jacket. Slipping it on, I hoped it wouldn’t fit.
I was tired of living in a house with your ex-wife’s ghost.
So sick of it! As I zipped it up, you said, It’s perfect.
~~~~
Copyright 2022 Beth Copeland. From Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
Beth Copeland is the author of Shibori Blue: Thirty-six Views of The Peak (Redhawk Publications, 2024): Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022); Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
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Fine poem. ❤️
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Isn’t it though?
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Indeed it is!
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Such moving poem–so delicately expressing the great loneliness of being “the second one”… I loved this.
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I do too. Each detail is perfectly rendered.
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How this slowly avalanches! Devastating. Whether personal story or imagined, your piece is beautifully constructed. A tutorial in making poems. Thank you for making and sharing it.
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Thank you, Beth, for your gripping, poignant and darkly beautiful poem. So many little stabbings and prickly-sharp things and places. And so damned depressing! But maybe I’m carrying a heap of empathy from imagining what my marriage might be. I feel so blessed to live in a home where nothing reminds my wife and me of a previous marriage.
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beautiful example of how an object can carry all the psychic energy of a relationship.
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The objective correlative, as Old Possum called it…
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At the end of the crushing poem, I see the vest not as a life jacket, but a straight-jacket. Or grief’s wardrobe you, Beth, were supposed to don, the second wife acting as hubby’s live-in therapist.
As the second husband of a second wife, both our originals alive and messing in other lives, we created ways to grow together into what became a magical future. Those former ships had sailed, and all that was left of them for us, was the smudges of their smoke trailing beyond the horizon.
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Straight jacket! I like that interpretation.
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Beth has truly captured the vulnerability of the second wife. Her poem brought up memories of sitting at dinner while my step kids and husband reminisced at length about times I hadn’t been part of. Dull pain. Awkward. Feelings of invisibility.
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Thank you for this poignant note, Jan.
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Thank you so much, Jan. I’m happy the poem resonated with you!
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Thank you so much, Jan. I’m happy the poem resonated with you!
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Beth, I hope you don’t mind that I’m outing you now as “poetreeline.” It’s always nice when the author engages the readers outside the poem.
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Beth: This poetry is so beautifully wistful and sad. You are gifted beyond measure. I just read all your other beautiful poems. My mother lost her first husband in May during his graduation flight off Montauk Point, 1948. They were wed that New Year’s Eve. In a certain way, she became a nomad of the heart the rest of her 90 years. She spent 25 of them leaving my father. She could write like you.
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Thank you, Sean.
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