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.
