Thirty-eight years at the kitchen table, and in the marriage bed--
how we ever made it I think I know: pure pride and pettiness of spirit,
moving our load of love from home to home and town to town,
owning little but each other, and the children that broke from me
into you. I have known you longer than I shall ever know them,
or myself, loving in wonder still because there is so much you seldom tell.

                    *

I like to watch you move, wherever: watering plants in the backyard, fussing
in the kitchen. Not that you float, flout or flow, O no danger of that,
no Pavlova and no fine-crotched young wonder on ice skates either. Just you:
a fifty-some year old woman--white hair, bifocals, baggy blue sweats, bobby socks.
A runaway kid, unadoptable, face on a milk carton. Your father's stoop
has settled in your shoulders, and in your eyes, your mother's obsessional search
for something more to scour. O kinetic disparity, the always busy you. And me--
                                                       that perpetual adolescent, still looking on.

                    *

"All human failures are failures of the imagination," I say. "Oh, God, not that
again," you respond, handing me another set of spoons to dry. We're
doing the dishes, together, investing each small nearly humiliating human
gesture with all the grace and intensity it will bear. "People spend so much time
attempting to be unique," I say, "but all they end up with is somebody else's
clothing, behavior or ideas.""Dry this," you say. "The real miracle in life,
it seems to me," I say, accepting a batch of wet forks, "is having the courage
to be perfectly, and I mean perfectly, ordinary.""Like us?" you ask. "Just
like us," I say, "for if each person could be exceptional, the world
would burn itself out in a day, leaving behind a spoonful, not even a handful,
of dust.""Are you through?" you ask."Yes," I say. "And see, see what I mean?"

                    *

Sitting in the backyard, my entire field of vision filled with you: your flowers.
Rose rich, burnt pink, stone white blossoms, oversized, all the way
down to the brick beginning of the yard, and back to this lattice bridge.
Your flowers: their moist labial lips (in mind, I tend them too), buds you bought,
planted and, as everything else you touch does, grew--up, up, even among
the ugly stones and conch shells, among the folded deck chairs, hard late
afternoons of our life. So these flowers stand, from your hands, from you.

                    *

You lie in the tub, still pleasant to my eyes, near perfect little carnal package
after all these years. Body and breath. I won't describe you, betray you
in that way, just for the delight of others. But I can say that water which
surrounds you is lucky, as I am, who can't conceive your not existing
in this world. Living is a borrowed thing, yes. The change will come, I hope
without dread. Yet breath and body, you and me, Kid, are some grand dust.

                    -Minor