I love how old men carry purses for their wives,
those stiff light beige or navy wedge-shaped bags
that match the women’s pumps,
with small gold clasps that click open and shut.
The men drowse off in medical center waiting rooms,
with bags perched in their laps like big tame birds
too worn to flap away. Within, the wives slowly undress,
put on the thin white robes, consult, come out
and wake the husbands dreaming openmouthed.
And when they both rise up
to take their constitutional,
walk up and down the block, her arms are free as air,
his right hand dangles down.
So I, desiring to shed this skin
for some light silken one,
will tell my husband, “Here, hold this,”
and watch him amble off into the mall among the shining
cans of motor oil, my leather bag
slung over his massive shoulder bone,
so prettily slender-waisted, so forgiving of the ways
we hold each other down, that watching him
I see how men love women, and women men,
and how the burden of the other comes to be
light as a feather blown, more quickly vanishing.
-Liz Rosenberg
