The Disintegration
Marge Piercy

We watch the marriage of friends
wear through like a once warm
woolen sock through which suddenly
the thickened big toenail peers.

There is a tone in which couples
address each other that strips
veneer from the furniture,
that curdles milk and turns wine

to vinegar. He drowns out
her tentative pleading voice; she
whispers on the phone secrets
of his failures like poison pellets.

He jokes about her weight.
She weeps into his soup.
Their bed grows wide as a mountain
valley down which a glacier crawls.

Leaving is not the worst thing
husbands do; divorce doesn't
end life the way contempt freezes
it like marrow drying in the bones.

We can only watch, spectators
at a slow disaster, not a wreck
but a gradual poisoning of a field
that once bore healthy crops.

Now all we can hope is that the house
at last falls down, the creep of misery
fades into grieving, with the dying
finally pronounced entirely dead.