Poem # 27: Rings

Having developed ring phobia,
I no longer wear my wedding band.
Here it is on the spice shelf
next to what remains of our saffron,
a few precious specks.

As for my wife,
she lost hers long ago:
took it off to go jogging,
she said (why I don’t know),
and left it at the foot of a giant oak.

When she went back
the ring had vanished!

One would think that a giant oak
already had enough rings.

*

One might do an entire series of poems on the phobias -- particularly the fringe ones, those that don't even have Greek/Latin names listed in the latest DRM (although anyone could make them up: in the case of rings, annulaphobia, perhaps).

Rings aren't necessary to a marriage; ours were cheap bands, anyway. We got married by a defrocked Catholic priest (he'd been cohabiting with a nun for thirty years before the relationship was discovered, he said) in our living room in a townhouse we were renting from a Japanese Seventh-Day Adventist church -- reduced rent in exchange for boarding one of their foreign students.

I was fine with my ring for years, but felt panicky one day: a feeling similar to being trapped in a tight space (I also have claustrophobia, and have always had it). So, I put the ring on a shelf and occasionally check in on it to make sure it's still there.

When Yukiko lost her ring, I went to look for it; while I was rooting about in the grass around the great big tree, I decided that if I was looking for something to confirm my marriage, I was looking in the wrong place (If the ring had been worth more, I might have looked a bit longer).

So, whatever keeps us together is stronger than gold, I guess. maybe it's imagination; we have our own poetry. Sometimes it's a sad poetry, sometimes it's downright surrealist, but we keep composing it.