wife is pretty as a wedding cake.
Think Wasp perfection,
Hitchcock's doomed blondes.
Like them, she knows something's up,

but this time she's not snooping,
just 'tidying up,' as women
did then, & when she finds
in her unfaithful husband's robe

pocket a brass key, she knows
at once where it fits. They're rich
enough for a paneled study, a man's
mahogany desk—everything

is gendered, this is the early '60s—
& there she finds his divorce
papers, old photographs, a birth
certificate that says her name

is a lie. & I thought of you, Mother,
& how you were like her,
though you had no desk or study
in that Flatbush walkup you shared

with my father, just tidying up,
when under his rolled socks
& Ban-Lon shirts you found his cache
of Air Corps discharge papers,

the vain & foolish lies—his rank
Second Lieutenant, not Major,
that he'd been a navigator, not
a bombardier. Grace Kelly's look-

alike will scream & tear
at her too-handsome husband's face,
then leave him for the life-raft lover
he'll slap her over, but you,

Mother, closed that cheap deal
drawer softly, like the door
to a room you were leaving for good,
like the lid to a wind-filled jar.