I thank you each day for freedom

from the toxic spills of divorce, plagues

of confrontation and accusation

accosting couples I once thought so firm

I wrote poems in praise of their beds.

 

I thank you for the most amorous

of advances done in the least obvious

of ways, the most remote of places,

new coasts discovered with finger’s flick,

lick of a neck, tongues softer now,

 

familiar in a language made new

by the surge and slippage of time,

those tides that capsize us sometimes,

leave us clinging to the rungs of our bodies.

I thank you for the better hotels

 

in which to dally in, love in, sleep in,

rat-traps of our young marriage

given way to double rooms or king

beds, more territory to roam in,

eventually find each other across

 

continents of hotel sheets, bunched

blankets. Gods, after hearing litanies

of agony from broken drunken husbands

and damaged-beyond-desperate wives,

thank you for choosing us to bear

 

happiness and sanity into the world,

the one couple in seven square miles

not squabbling over the remote or

the whiskey, in-laws and kids,

custody of the car and history

 

of the hurts. I thank them and I

thank the fallible glorious man

who wakes me, daily, from sleep—

lips giving me the slightest possible

kiss one can give to claim another.


Photo by Melvin E.