The Bad Wife Handbook
The Bad Wife Handbook
Rachel Zucker
WESLEYAN POETRY
Wesleyan University Press
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
© 2007 by Rachel Zucker
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zucker, Rachel.
The bad wife handbook / Rachel Zucker.
p. cm. -- (Wesleyan poetry)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3626.U26B33 2007
811’.6--dc222007019778
“Cover photograph by Celeste Fichter.”
In spite of & because,Joshua Goren
Contents
Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker 11
Where I Went Instead of Paris 14
It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon 16
What Is Not Science is Art is Nature 24
Freud Had Sex but Jung Had God 26
The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma 71
Acknowledgments, Dedications, and Notes 113
… synonyms do not exist.
—Donald Hall
Monogamist
A human being can’t compare
size and brightness
on two occasions. So we say
the moon has a dark side.
We say the tide twice a day. I say that man there, so unlike
my husband.
The Museum of Accidents
The school girl’s tights speckle
in the rain. In the city
the sparrow on sparrow feet skips
across my path, legs invisible.
We are bound. Similar,
indistinct forms called bodies,
our Milky Way’s spiral arms—
stars, nebulae, matter—
bound
to great disaster.
Codary
Once he was a type, kind, tide,
but became a singularity.
I stopped breathing.
Where the husband’s orbit overlaps: darkness.
No light can be shed on what lies beyond this
gravitational sheer,
harsh polarity
of wanting.