by Stazja McFayden

This is how Wednesday should feel!
Balcony stereo speakers
blaring Puccini's passion;
La Boheme echoes over
foggy autumn lake,
exalting neighbors
or irritating them.
I wander around the bedroom
swathed in jungle orchid dressing gown
unbelted -- gliding like intimate fingers.
Digging in cherrywood drawers
for notepad to jot a metaphor
plucked from aria crescendo,
otherwise it might evaporate like haze.
Wednesday I flaunt my privilege
unshowered
undressed
unpressured
shamelessly late in the afternoon.
Your bookkeeper's wife
calls to ask for volunteers;
I will be available for her tomorrow.
Curse you affectionately,
you silly man, reorganized the photographs
and papers I had stashed away.
And what is this envelope?
Your love letters, 1975 --
you open with someone else's love poem:
"and nothing tastes so beautiful as her lips but her lips."
Words of your own scribbled in a hand
it would take a Chinaman to decipher:
"yes, I lie in bed and live my future,
well to do and you are by my side,"
you wrote so many years ago,
and now I live your dream,
knowing you never wrote poems
for your other wives.
My eyes and lips smile
reading the scrawl
about the velvet robe
rich with wear.
I was impoverished --
did not know that at the time --
purchasing someone else's
elegant dressing gown for pennies
at a Hollywood thrift store,
forgetting to pack it
when I returned from
our February weekend --
you wrote you threw it away
you said I should wear a sheer one
or none at all -- your taste.
I read the letter twice
before returning to Wednesday luxury,
that whimsical metaphor forgotten;
ah, but the love poem found!