The Clerk Says You Are Not

Chivas Sandage wrote this poem and read it at last week’s Marriage Equality Rally in Hartford, Connecticut, which she helped organize.

 
 

The clerk says you are not

my wife, says it is written

 

so it is so. Because

it was written

 

one place, we

cannot be written in another.

 

The clerk would not

hand me the thin page

 

that we pay her to hand others—

its black lines waiting

 

for pairs to sign their names.

Love, the letters of ours

 

might unravel across the pale

rows were we not

 

you and not me.

The clerk’s fingers tremble

 

as she dangles our marriage

application at her side,

 

as if it’s just paper—

not our lives.

 

She says it’s not her doing

but the doing of others

 

who have written

that you are not my wife.

 

Love, they have written

that our yellow house

 

is not mine. That our child

is not yours. That our rings

 

are not sacred talismans

we wear to our shared grave. Love,

 

I left the marriage counter

and returned home joyful

 

to find faint tracks of your work boots

across our kitchen floor—the path

 

that returns you to me

at the end of each day.

 

I will return to ask

for the page. Someday, we will return

 

and the marriage clerk will do something

she does over and over every day—

 

something she’s never done—

she will hand us that shaking page.

 

Photo courtesy of Vivian Felten

Chivas Sandage’s first book of poems, Hidden Drive (Antrim House, 2012), places Ada with Eve in Eden and explores same-sex marriage and divorce. Her essays and poems on gay marriage have appeared in Ms. Magazine,The Naugatuck River Review, Upstreet, Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate (Prometheus Books, ‘04) and are forthcoming in Knockout Magazine. Her work has also appeared in Artful Dodge, Drunken Boat, Evergreen Review, Hampshire Life Magazine, The Hartford Courant, Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2006) and Morning Song: Poems for New Parents (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Sandage holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Bennington College. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and daughter and blogs at csandage.com.