They’re not the happiest couple.
They steal kisses between ten hour shifts,
accidentally brush hands in the grocery store aisle.
Somehow he always tickles her hips
when her fingertips are too wrinkled from dishwater to sense his heat.
She sleeps plank style.
It’s too hard to swallow the bush fire he ignites
so she exhales the tension between the pages of pillow talk novels,
that only a moment of stolen attention from his tumbledown body could release.
She daydreams she knew him when he climbed female bodies like jungle gyms,
when the next stroke and the next toke where the only things worth living for.
But I was there
when she divided each morsel of life
between four children without a table crumb for herself.
Her fitful eyes never let me forget
that a mother’s fading light
is her daughters richest nourishment.
She once told me, on a balcony over Vancouver Bay,
that she’d already found and let slip
in a previous marriage
what most of us spend our whole lives in search of.
In a boy who descended her body like the tide.
Now
she’s no longer alone,
and they may not be the happiest couple,
but sometimes
that’s enough.