Free Post Week 10

For My Marriage: 1989-1993

You talk of the owls that roosted in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china softening against the joists,
the pristine blossoms slipping, going Rorschach.
Your father's police uniform,
still sharp in its gasping cellophane.
These things, that burn between the planks,
have hardened and moldered for years,
but more often than not, I don't believe them now.

I believed in the olive oil hissing on our stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout
tinging those minute spaces with sloppy pink promises
left to settle against the slab. I loved the quake of our bodies.
Your hands always smelling of tea bags, of spray starch,
of mulch, and Summer's last gargled ache.

Today for example, I scavenged for keys
while another gentle minor third
 slipped itself into yesterday.
The strings of my hands twinged.
Where are we now,
after the glass shriek nights,
my shattered wrist rejoined,
after your cardboard vows and apologies
 I always took at face value?

Children half our age draped our skin.
They laughed at us. They knew,
knew we wouldn't last the sweltering decades.
Yet children half our age
mounted faded barstools with palms of angst and beer
in that quaint town from our Technicolor memories,
 post marked Alexandria, 1984.
In the space between yesterday and today,
cords tumble in February's stack-stone hearth.