Showing Your Work

Fidelity in marriage is often like the word humble. It is almost better unsaid because the pronouncement of it takes one out of it. This forces us to step back from it. This poem defines fidelity by its destruction.

Showing Your Work

                Marriage…

Count the rings    No wait

Let me show you    how a tree is not cut down

An excavator huffs black smoke    growling

around the new foundation    eases downhill 

where a Ponderosa Pine crowds the altered landscape

There are careful considerations    but it’s not a test    

The bucket is raised and laid 

gently against the trunk’s shoulder

the way a tired child might give in to sleep

This is not about someone 

getting their way    getting away

by cutting a wedge    hoping things fall 

just so    With the slow & steady shove

of promise    I am surprised nothing breaks

under pressure

or comes apart    but simply falls    burgeoning 

strong even in the uprooting    This is how we two

grew as one    as if waiting for this reveal 

all along    Our enormous root ball

gripping fists of rock    boulders    Even in these last days

I see reflected    in your dark pupils    the sacred 

move between    balance & basalt    the burdens of terra 

confessed    Treasure

hidden in simple clay an unearthing 

for all to see     What we cannot change     

                                                                      has changed us 

mass we could not move    

                                             held aloft our crown

A note to the reader: In Susan Cowger’s poetry, extra spaces between words serve as the pauses that punctuation normally provides. Capital letters denote the beginning of a new sentence.

The featured image is courtesy of Amelia M. Freidline and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.

Susan Cowger

Poet and visual artist, Susan attends to image: water, sky, faces, flowers, and birds, oh the birds,
even rocks and pebbles, wherever beauty heals and anoints. Beauty ever provides when life feels
bereft. Susan has traveled to marvelous places worldwide and worked in Kenya with Spring of
Hope International. Now Susan and husband Dana live in Spokane WA. Married 47 years, they
have four children and 22 grandchildren (and yes, she finds that number rather shocking too).

susancowger.com