Kayla Beth Moore on Justin Lacour’s “Marriage”

At the heart of Lacour’s “Marriage” is the bone-deep familiarity, the utter knowing and being known that only years of marriage (and the physical-spiritual commitment it requires) make possible. This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. But think about that–it’s a mutation, a horror. And this is a poem of horror, but also of intimacy, tenderness, and order, and enough of each to warrant the title.

The representation of this familiarity begins with a joke and a lighthearted tone, “You have that joke about Euripides.” We know something about this couple now: they make puns. They make puns about ancient tragedians. And we know something of their world. It’s rich in literature; it’s private. They share a world of stories and symbols to which they return. (We’re “back” to The Bacchae, after all). This poem, turns out, is a little tour of their world, and before you know it, the line between literature and life has faded.

We don’t tend to think well of monsters, not in stories and certainly not in life. The Bacchae is a story of gods and men and women behaving monstrously, and one party’s monstrosity causes the others’ (go read it to find out which way the causation arrow points). In this poem, both parties are subject to monstrosity: the speaker “remain(s) optimistic / even as I’m ripped apart,” and the spouse in the poem is waiting for a story where the wildness of women and the woods where they frolic are not curses, not manipulations, not a kind of damnation. The speaker sees the woman want this, and sees her do something about it.

She’ll write the epic she needs (and as we see and sense in the poem, if she needs it, the speaker needs it too). And she’ll play by the rules. Dactylic hexameter is the meter of epics. Think Homer, Virgil, Ovid. It is the music of an old story memorized, recited, and sung. It is the song of long-held memory, of valor, high stakes, and heroes, of foes defeated, of glory gained, of monsters vanquished. The form gives the chaos and bloodshed an order. It’s as if the monsters are wrestled by the words of the story themselves.

But the great surprise of this poem is that while both the speaker and his spouse are reading about and living in some kind of monstrosity, the image of marriage itself is that of a monster: “this animal with two heads, / one body.” I’ve been walking around with this image rattling around in my head for a few weeks now, and I don’t think I’m going to shake it; it’s too apt.

The world of marriage is a shared story, and a brutal one. We make the best we can of the stories we encounter, and when those don’t work we write new ones. But marriage means if you need a new story, someone else needs it too, and once it’s written, they’re there to be in it and to hear your report of it. Because in all of this sharing of stories, your blood is now coursing through their veins. We’ve moved beyond I and Thou. Two heads means two thinking centers, two imaginations, but one body means all sensations are shared. Where I go, you go. If I am ripped apart, well then, there goes your right arm, too. And we huddle and we shuffle together, “near / the light so we can see.”

The final image, “My neck rubs against your neck, as you read your epic to me,” is one of tenderness and ease. We’re back to lightness and to stories. One mouth speaking, four ears listening.