I Am Tired of Being a Wife

 —after Neruda

 

I walk into the kitchen stores empty of desire
for Dutch ovens, silicon mats, tart pans.
In the grocery stores and farm markets
I am cold and still as an iceberg.

Recipes bore me. Bathtub rings disgust me.
The smell of bakeries brings me to tears.
I want no more dust rags or oven cleaners,  
no more spray starch or furniture polish.

I want to swim in the cool lake of indifference.
That’s why the days unroll like heavy carpets
covered in dust and dog hair, bearing
discarded seeds and crumbs,
the lost nickels and pennies.

I only want to slip
like a grain of sand into the ocean.

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Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of four poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), Aileron (Terrapin Books). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert:A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com