What Kind of Woman

by Kate Baer

In restaurants we argue over who will pay even though the real question is who will confess their children are dull or their marriage has holes at the knees.

You are not an evergreen, unchanged by the pitiless snow. You are not a photo, a brand, a character written for sex or house or show. You do not have to choose one or the other: a dream or a dreamer, the bird or the birder. You may be a woman of commotion and quiet. Magic and brain.

This is not a dress rehearsal before a better kind of life.

Drink more water. Fold your sweaters. This is the time to buy a hat. When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands. Little by little, mountains are climbed.

At any given moment there is someone getting what they always wanted. I know no quicker way to ruin a day than to dwell on this.

When I took you as a husband I did not know the deaths our love would suffer. I did not know the graves of loneliness.

For a time we have the good wife. The thin wife. Eventually the dead wife. The ghost of every woman who tried to change for you.

The moment in the argument when the only sound between us is the buzz of locusts, cars from a passing street, God licking her fingertips, wondering how this is going to go.

When someone says some- thing strange about a party, I assume it’s a surprise party just for me.

To find the ones who say, I am not afraid of sitting in the dark with you.

I dreamt myself into a mother, but when I became her, I had to dream her back into a woman back into a woman back into a woman again.

I do not remember being born or how I knew my mother’s face. Only that we woke to the sound of pots banging against the stove, knowing she would be downstairs.