Frances Klein | poetry | Better Half

    
   
Better Half


A confession: I do things in half measures.

Half the dishes washed, pots and pans abandoned
to soak in lukewarm water, the night half-over and half the wine drunk.

Guests collecting coats, calling cars, the few that remain
the same ones who showed up half an hour early
to set the table, to be handed a broad wooden spoon
for making slow half-circles in the risotto: here, stir.

I have half the children I should have,
which is to say I have one.

I am half as able as I once was,
hand twice as tight on the railing,
eyes measuring the distance and halving it
so that I might make it back undoubled.

When I practice our arguments I speak like a dinosaur
skeleton in a museum, bones of the battle half real, half fabricated.

I’ve read only half the books on our shelves,
but isn’t that marriage?

We come to union asking to be halved,
our burden reduced, each of us lifting one end
of the old yellow couch as we take it to the curb,
half-bickering about who brought it in
half a lifetime ago, wholly uninterested in the answer.