Ways of Saying “And”

I tried to answer my first wife
in truth(e)
that, yes, she is selfish
and that this is good:
Less wear, Few wounds, No rind where ought be ‘life.’
But she gnashed and wailed,
her Protestant iceberg atremble,
and I curled back my words
with the bad faith of the midway lover.
 
We’d matched tattoos—
still do, I’d think:
Black ink ampersands,
near or on our hands.
Hers: a neat-cut, print-stamp glyph.
Mine: a ligature, an ancient, ob-scure thing.
Two-tier semiosis of conjunction +
Absolute disjunction of the form =
Relation that can only sink.
 
I found her, years later, as public words across a screen.
I searched in fragments, for that which stabs the eye:

It spoke of strangers passing one another by
—strangers with matching tattoos.
My fearful gut wailed “me.”
But wrong—it was all she:
Regenerating cells, and mirrors, and an inexorable becoming,
becoming ever more herself,
obscuring ancient bodies,
cutting, neat-wise, the ligatures of I.
And, on or near my hands:
the stink of two-tier selfishness.