The Wife
Suzanne Morris
August 7, 2022
There's a cancer on the presidency. John Dean
It changed my life, and not for the good. Stephen Ayres
She has stood by him
through it all
and now she sits behind him
in the chamber
as he testifies, under oath,
before the Committee.
And I am reminded of
another wife
some fifty years ago
who stood by her man
in circumstances
different in some ways;
in others, eerily the same.
She lacks the refinement
of that earlier one,
the chic designer garments
and eye-catching jewelry that
riveted the television
audience day after day
but she has, at the same time,
a kind of delicacy about her
in the high cheekbones
and small mouth
the clear, wide-set eyes
and fair complexion.
And there is that same
inscrutable look
and remarkable
composure
that I remember in
the one before,
at least until near the end when
the witness is asked
what his life was like before,
then after, that day
when the lies he had believed in
erupted in chaos and destruction.
He remembers being just a
regular family man,
working at the same place
for twenty years
making his way up to
supervisor;
but after, he was fired and
had to sell their home.
At these words, the wife’s facade
breaks into pieces
like fine porcelain
dropping from a ledge
and I can’t help thinking
the price she has paid
and will go on paying is
higher than that of the earlier one
given this age of raging
social media,
of hate mail and death threats.
And I wonder what
she is thinking as
the gentleman from Maryland
thanks the witness for his testimony.
But her face has become
inscrutable again.
For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.
