Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.
I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.
Glancing
at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf
she said
I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and
something exposed itself in her voice,
a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe—
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t
mean them to.
Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.
God
or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know
how novelist Ōe
describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke
as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio
and cried.
Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.
Astonished
and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.
Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had
become human
on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage
my husband
began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.
If I answered [she]
hung up. My ears grew hoarse.
How are you.
—
No.
—
Maybe. Eight. Can you.
—
The white oh yes.
—
Yes.
What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls
of the flesh
of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull
than the tick of a clock.
A puppy
learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.
Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
the emperor would wipe away their tears
with his own hand.
