A shattered window
lets the wind stand on edge in its cracks,
yet marriage is not a knot
meant to seize those gaps.
Like a standing trunk, skinned alive by time,
dried to death yet quietly immense,
marriage is not a field of potatoes
but the cultivation of thorns.
Love—
two strands drunk on their own liquor,
sometimes slipping into one,
scanning the other inch by inch,
now and then holding a flesh-heavy smile.
Leechlike disappointments and angers
are cut to measure by endurance,
and like the dung beetle,
unyielding,
we can roll one another on.
The grain of union
is woven not as a lighthouse,
but as a reef.
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