You stand by the table that carries remnants of our
breakfast, wipe your beard of my moisture.
My body tangled in pillows and comforters I realize
I have witnessed your beard gray these past ten years,
noticed curly silver emerge on your chest and groin.
You smile, smell the Kleenex, look out the white
curtains at the Sacramento rain.
“Wild nights,” I think, and my mind turns to luxury.
For now comfort rides passion’s wave.
Indifference seems drowned in the gutters
below us. You know me from the marrow out.
“I travel the road into my soul,” she wrote.
I see the digressions in our journey.
In an hour we pick up the children.
I inhale the silence–the first spring air–as
You linger naked over her collected works.
Carolyn Crane
1992