Married

Cleaning the apartment yet again, and happened across a book I'd picked up last year when I was trying my damndest to gain a better appreciation for this 'spoken word' stuff. The book, Word of Mouth, is an NPR-produced compilation of all sorts of artists.

I'm not smart enough to appreciate really complex prose - yet, but I one poem from the book pretty much knocked me on my ass. Googling the poem found at least one other person who'd heard of it. This is 'Married', by Jack Gilbert:

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.