Anne Carson - The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

ALSO BT ANNE CARSON

Men in the Off Hours

Economy of the Unlost

Autobiography of Red

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

Glass, Irony and God

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

more Bad reasons for her sorrow, as appears
In the famed memoirs of a thousand years
Written by Crafticant

JOHN KEATS ,

The Jealousies: A Faery Tale,
by Lucy Vaughan Lloyd of China Walk,
Lambeth, lines 84-87

A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.

Fair reader I offer merely an analogy.

A delay.

Use delay instead of picture or painting
a delay in glass
as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver.
So Duchamp
of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

which broke in eight pieces in transit from the Brooklyn Museum

to Connecticut (1912).

What is being delayed?
Marriage I guess.
That swaying place as my husband called it.
Look how the word
shines.

Tis chosen I hear from Hymens jewelry,
And you will prize it, lady, I doubt not,
Beyond all pleasures past and all to come.

JOHN KEATS ,
Otho the Great: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1.1.137-39

You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: is how Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektoroften turning to look back
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp thishush, let's pass

to natural situations.
Other species, which are not poisonous, often have colorations and patterns
similar to poisonous species.
This imitation of a poisonous by a nonpoisonous species is called mimicry.
My husband was no mimic.
You will mention of course the war games. I complained to you often enough
when they were here all night
with the boards spread out and rugs and little lamps and cigarettes like Napoleon's
tent I suppose,
who could sleep? All in all my husband was a man who knew more
about the Battle of Borodino
than he did about his own wife's body, much more! Tensions poured up the walls
and along the ceiling,
sometimes they played Friday night till Monday morning straight through, he
and his pale wrathful friends.
They sweated badly. They ate meats of the countries in play.
Jealousy
formed no small part of my relationship to the Battle of Borodino.

I hate it.
Do you.
Why play all night.
The time is real.
It's a game.
It's a real game.
Is that a quote.
Come here.
No.
I need to touch you.
No.
Yes.

That night we made love the real way which we had not yet attempted although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk (On Defloration) which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

Will you return, Prince, to our banquetting?

JOHN KEATS,
Otho the Great: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1.2.152

His mistress at that timeindeed the very concept mistress for himwas French.
Friends of his told me that she didn't wash and in bars was inclined
to order liters of champagne on his tab.

I can imagine how he would frown, curse, sigh, lift his hands and adore it.
He took me to a movie about a bookshop in Paris
whose owner liked to have his assistant

mount a ladder to fetch a book then he slides his hand up her leg.
Just thatone hand, momentary. Her blush heats the theater.
Every time he said Go, up she went.

How do people get power over one another he said wonderingly as we came out
onto the street. Bruises too filled him with curiosity.
I could not meet this need,

I hear she did. The reason I mention washing is that it puzzled me why
none of this seemed unclean in his study of it.
None of it was orgasmic for him,

his thrustanalytic you could say, as if discovering a new crystal.
Is innocence just one of the disguises of beauty?
He could fill structures of

threat with a light like the earliest olive oil. I began to understand nature
as something seamed and deep into which one plunged, going dark.
Yes I am delaying again.

Clothed in flames and rolling through the sky is how I felt the night he told me
he had a mistress and with shy pride
slid out a photograph.

I can't see the face I said angrily, throwing it down. He looked at me.
We were at a window (restaurant) high above the street,
married a little more than a year.

Quick work I said. Are you going to be arch he said.
I broke the glass and jumped.
Now of course you know

that isn't the true story, what broke wasn't glass, what fell to earth wasn't body.
But still when I recall the conversation it's what I seeme a fighter pilot
bailing out over the channel. Me as kill.

Oh no we're not enemies he said. I love you! I love you both.
Is it not Mr. Rochester who grinds his teeth and tells us
in less than two minutes with its gliding green hiss

jealousy can eat to a heart's core, this formula having occurred to him
as he sat in the musk and amber
of a Paris balcony

watching his opera beauty arrive on the arm of a strange cavalier?
To stay human is to break a limitation.
Like it if you can. Like it if you dare.

Here, Albert, this old phantom wants a proof!
Give him his proof! A camel's load of proofs!

JOHN KEATS ,
Otho aie Great: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 3.2.208-9

Rotate the husband and expose a hidden side. A letter he wrote from Rio de Janeiro.
Why Rio de Janeiro? is not a question worth asking.
We had been separated three years but not yet divorced.