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.
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The clerk says you are not
my wife, says it is written
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so it is so. Because
it was written
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one place, we
cannot be written in another.
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The clerk would not
hand me the thin page
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that we pay her to hand others—
its black lines waiting
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for pairs to sign their names.
Love, the letters of ours
Â
might unravel across the pale
rows were we not
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you and not me.
The clerk’s fingers tremble
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as she dangles our marriage
application at her side,
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as if it’s just paper—
not our lives.
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She says it’s not her doing
but the doing of others
Â
who have written
that you are not my wife.
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Love, they have written
that our yellow house
Â
is not mine. That our child
is not yours. That our rings
Â
are not sacred talismans
we wear to our shared grave. Love,
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I left the marriage counter
and returned home joyful
Â
to find faint tracks of your work boots
across our kitchen floor—the path
Â
that returns you to me
at the end of each day.
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I will return to ask
for the page. Someday, we will return
Â
and the marriage clerk will do something
she does over and over every day—
Â
something she’s never done—
she will hand us that shaking page.
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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.
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