Jealousy

Jealousy is no more a form of paranoia
than is any other art form that would locate
some pattern in our experience.
              W. H. FINN

Without it nothing would make enough sense.
Alone, he listens for the grudging hush
of tires, her furtive dive home
as the family car swerves into their drive,
the neat pat squeak of brakes,
a door slam—five minutes late.
A car sighs up the street, seems
to pause, passes, not his wife.
Already the night teems with evidence.
How abstractly that morning
she’d milled her hair.
And the last time she got home this late—
how willing to explain it she had been.
The case, he nods grimly to himself,
is now almost complete.
No matter how much he hates what it says
he must follow up every lead.
Once again he goes over the scene—
a parked car perhaps, the streetlight’s
sickly pallor on the hood,
how one last time she would hesitate,
then, with almost a sigh of relief
give her mouth gradually to another man,
be whispering something urgent,
be kissing him again, unlocking slowly
an even deeper secret and unloosening it.
But it’s not their silent grappling
on the seat, the minor clicks of passion,
it’s not the bustle of clothing
which he wants. It’s that hush
of the moment before, the threshhold
when a gap in the conversation went
taut, redundant under the weight
of silence. That
is the moment on which he’s come to count—
a moment when, each time he constructs it anew,
adds another harsh catch in his breath
and hurts him again, it hurts
even more, hurts him so much
he no longer cares if it’s true.