We’re Not Old Yet, Lover

Credit: author.

Show me your teeth but not in a glass

(we’re youngish still; please, bite me on the under-

belly of my arm. I will make you mushy oatmeal in your eighties,

you can teach me sudoku, then I will remove

the parenthetical distance between us).

Today I will lick your incisors, make rare steak for them

before the kids arrive all grown up with babies.

The lawn will be reconstructed with badminton nets

and croquet that we admire and never use. Coffee,

beer, kombucha, detergent are the liquids of spring.

We are too refined, turning over in our white sheets

while across the world countries fold in half, empty

of their citizens. Can we live happily enough for them?

Will you be the lark in my heart singing lullabies to my

Russian storm cloud? We can’t always choose

our weather systems. Yours is California sunny skies, mine is

a month of April: cumulus, blue, wind, calm, downpour, hail, rainbows.

Your steadiness, my exclamation marks combine like a tongue

reaching for a lollypop—made for each other —

like the eagle making its nest, deep and sticky enough

for life to spring from cracking eggs.