the small favors, the daily gifts.

Not that there isn’t passion: the hotel bed

left a mess, bright wrappers and ribbons

scattered across the floor. But we love

where we’ve come to, this drowsy morning

among strangers, slumped shoulder to shoulder,

holding each other up. Our round and clumsy

waitress owns the place, trundles

between the counters filling cup after cup.

When she walks the short length of the diner,

each floorboard aches under her weight, shakes

us awake. She stops before us and lowers

her face, unlined, moon-shaped,

between our faces, her hands outstretched

palms up, in love with her work, asking

what more we could want?

Sunday Radio

From my husband’s window I hear a woman

singing, low in her throat, a song meant to break

a thousand hearts into bloom.

In his loneliness he sings too,

losing words and notes along the way

but staying with her, sure of the refrain.

This is the hardest part of the marriage: knowing.

Clipping the roses, knowing. Raking the leaves.

Pausing at the staircase to listen

to how his voice breaks, then goes on with the song.

Enough Music

Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive,

and we’ve talked enough and listened

to enough music and stopped twice,

once to eat, once to see the view,

we fall into this rhythm of silence.

It swings back and forth between us

like a rope over a lake.

Maybe it’s what we don’t say

that saves us.

Kaleidoscope

I remember sex before my husband

as a vague, vagrant landscape

of taller, darker men, all thick hair

and hands, the full lips of the rich past.

And sometimes, when I’m taking a sidewalk

full tilt, my heels chipping

the glittering cement, I feel their eyes,

their sweet lost fingers

tugging at my clothes — the one

who fell behind just to watch me walk,

to see me as a stranger might,

then caught up to catch

a handful of my hair, turn me around,

pull me back into his body’s deep folds.

They all come back, tenacious

as angels, to lean against me

at the movies, the beach — a shoulder

or a thigh pressed to mine, lashes

black and matted, and always

naked, clean and pure as souls slipped

glistening from the body’s warm wick,

like my husband’s fingers when he dips

into me, then lifts them

to his face, heavy with glaze, the leaves

crowded against our window, shivering.

This Close

In the room where we lie, light

stains the drawn shades yellow.

We sweat and pull at each other, climb

with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.

Wherever our bodies touch, the flesh

comes alive. Heat and need, like invisible

animals, gnaw at my breasts, the soft

insides of your thighs. What I want

I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now,

the dark human bread I eat handful

by greedy handful. Eyes, fingers, mouths,