After Litton
Adah Reflects on Her Third Marriage
Adah, 1965
Mesa, Arizona

by Anna Citrino


Kindness, tenderness, attention to mood or emotion,
romance—these were things of fantasy.
I’d never had them. Wishing for them
could bring disappointment.
Marriage was a practical move.

When I first met Litton at Fort Russell,
he was with a different woman.
I didn’t see that as an obstacle. I knew
how to please a man
and wanted him.

Marriage is a negotiation of terms
partners agree to live with, and the terms
looked good to us.

As a widow, I had life insurance money and income
from Gerard’s pension, as well as deeds to properties
held in collateral from loans to people during
the Depression. A military man, Litton
had guaranteed income, and I assumed
a good-sized pension. After years of uncertainty
in childhood about food and shelter, these
were the comfort and security I wanted.

So, we married. A simple ceremony.
No need for frills and extra expense.

Thirty years I spent with Litton.

We had a solid house, one like I’d always wanted—
a living room stuffed with matching couch and chairs
with plush cushions, lace tablecloths, ceramic dinnerware,
glass goblets, and linen napkins. These gave me
a kind of beauty I’d longed for.

We moved to humid Arkansas, later to Arizona
with its dry, red hills. Always, I cooked his favorite
foods, did laundry as he liked—shirts pressed
wrinkle-free, collars ironed to a perfect point.
My house was tidy, orderly, and clean,
my clothes well-made.

But life was not much more than that.

When he died, I didn’t take his pension.
Mine was better.

After the funeral, I sat alone in that desert-still
Arizona house filled with a wealth of goods
I’d wished to possess since childhood—
that dream’s weight lying there stiff, stale,
coated with dust after returning
from the burial in Denver.

Kindness, an arm reaching toward me
in tenderness, in friendship—I wanted them.
All that beautiful dinnerware.
Stability. Structure.

They aren’t enough.

I turned on the radio. An orchestra was playing.
Violins rose in volume, swelling
like enormous billowing clouds, mounting
high into the heavens ready to rain,
then dissipating, the sky turning clear,

only the quietest of sighs present—a soft wind’s
wrinkle on morning grass as the sun
stretched to warm the world.

I’d never heard anything more able
to define my yearning—

At seventy-five years old, I realized
something I’d been wishing for all my life
but had no words for was something more
like music.


* * * * *

"After Litton" is part of Anna Citrino's growing longer work of related poems. More poems from the longer work were posted here on November 10 and 11 and December 14 and 15, 2023, and one more will follow January 31, 2024.

Anna Citrino is the author of A Space Between, and Buoyant, Saudade, and To Find a River. Anna taught abroad in six different countries: Turkey, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, and the UK. Her work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Canary, Evening Street Review, Indelible, Paterson Literary Review, phren-z, Poppy Road Review, and the Porter Gulch Review, among other literary journals. On most any day you can find her going for walks near the coast or biking on paths through rolling hills where she lives in Sonoma County, California. Read more of her writing at annacitrino.com.