Long Marriages

by Judy Kronenfeld

i
Mother of stone, none of us gathered
in your hospital room know
until I bend over you, the crash cart
rushes in, everyone’s shouted out,
CODE BLUE stabs our eardrums—
Dad and I watch from the hall, squeezing
our eyes against chest compressions, shocks
to your heart that make your torso leap—all merely
methodical. We’re herded into the waiting area
where the others sit, helpless, until the two of us
are allowed back, after you’ve been
pronounced, the tube still protruding
from your mouth. Dad collapses into a chair,
head dropped onto his chest, weeps into the palms
of his hands like a broken Rodin.

I kneel in front of him, fling my arms around
his neck. I loved you fiercely, old-world mother,
but Dad is the easier parent, you know,
and some part of me thinks—if not in words—
better you first.  

I whisper through my own tears,
Don’t worry Daddy, don’t worry, please.
I’ll take care...

As if my care were the question, Mom,
as if a daughter can compensate
for the country with its own climate,
temperate or not, its own customs,
its own unwritten codes, that is wiped off
the map when a spouse of 55 years dies.

ii
Thirty years later—Dad, too, long gone—
I rise from our bed to find you, beloved,
reading the paper in the kitchen of our country,
and reach for you, and you put your arms
so easily around me, and I feel the exactness
of your chest, the stubble of your cheek,
I smell your never-been-peppermint breath.

Our daughter or son—who’ve lived with us
barely a third of the time we’ve lived with each other—
will one day too soon put their arms around you
or me, saying: Don’t worry Dad, or Don’t worry, Mom,
don’t worry, please. I’ll take care of you.

If it’s me, I’ll know, then, in my fragile bones:
you, only you, can console me
for your own death.


* * * * *

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2^nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad.