Love

he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her

with one hand and painted with the other. He got

two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife

sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite

willows and cut them, delicately, and then buried

them again. He jokes, “that’s what I get for marrying

a woman from a sanitarium!” but she was from

Vienna, they met in the street, he stopped her and

she believed his eyes said, “I do not want to die,

do not let me die,” so she touched his face, there,

in the street, as a person touches a comma on a

page after they have returned home from a place

that has no commas. On their wedding night, she

ran him a lukewarm bath and his testicles looked

like overripe plums. He raped her until a low moan

seemed to come from the walls, as if wolves were

angry and coming and Klimt went to bed forcefully

and his wife went to bed with dirty blood around

her nostrils and mouth. It goes on like this for years,

just as it goes on for years for everyone who marries

someone they cannot love. You step, body over

body, into the kitchen to kiss your sweat and rot

good morning. “Let me tell you something,” she

says on the day that he paints “The Kiss” and he

hits her in the head before she can remember the

something. She thinks it might have been important.

It might have been something. When he shows

the painting to his friends, they say he must be

the most romantic man in the world and she nods.

And the man in the painting pushes the woman

down further, flows into her, gold and angry, and

her eyes are shut and they do not look clenched

and this is puzzling, but no one else seems to notice.