(Rare) love poem, #2

Some time in the middle of January 1983, I met my husband. We were university students, we did the dishes together one night and here we are, thirty years on.

How, I still wonder, did that happen? And so, a poem:

Constance

 

With the heat furling
off my hot-watered hands,
you come in
breathing snow,
and change the quality
of the light.

It is winter, overnight.

For decades holding
the towel,
as my wifely foot
breaches the mat,
this tender, domestic act.

Burrowed like
misguided squirrels in our eaves,
we’ve led a family life
with ease,

fulfilled, in such quiet lives as these.

It’s a different kind of surrender,
to love that avails
from May to December,

such constance, like seasons,
must change, yet remembers.


PD/2013