consider a life in fealty to futility:
it is staring down a mirrored hallway
it is mistaking deflection for definition
it is a stumble on the clipped tips of a waking wingspan
it is those sheds piling deadly at the bedfoot
and discovering in their toppling midsts one can not –
despite promise and practice –
lift off, let alone swoop or soar
this is a life lived groundlocked, flapping halfly whole
wrapping twisted digits ‘round handfuls of grasped-at ground
this is collecting desperate pebbles cast by careless, creeping waves
and letting the self abate in those crawling tendrils
unedged and undefined

consider instead a life freed from fret:
having once hated this soft body, this reeling mind
I can instead stretch upward from her and our sorely rested nest
I find in her a loving wisdom
she and I aligned in sideways symmetry
I find in her a knowing affection
could and would not make her choices twice
hold love respect understand that woman who did

January, I met you last in sober resolve
a bet with my conscience lost
by February
that month frivoled and forgotten as masked March set
and days to weeks to months later
April disappeared with her disasters
and in May they bloomed bloody
a vicious, unfolding pattern
then June, an inverse of her former selves, was stoned and indignant
a domino of vile days marching on through soggy July
whose dearth of freedoms at least held me a version of close
toward August, where I rose as a meekly kindled long-dead flame
returned again, never yet done, and on
through something like September
I let creep in a loneliness heartier than any fall former
until October erupted
withered and giving, I found life in a sour wine start
still, an ending, and leapt into a fog of weeks,
a queasy November, and finally December
found footing on soft ground and now
another January rises, her life unknown and familiar
together and thicker and simpler and my
conscience without for once, bound beyond myself
for another year around some sun
as and with and for someone

in the morning when I watered the plants
the trash truck backed and beeped its way by and
one neighbor in an oversized black SUV burst too strongly
up the street, then gruffed her tires to the curb
squeaking rubber and scowling
to let the collectors slip through before
she shot down the remainder of the outlet, squealing onto
the main road and rupturing this morning ritual of
crow squawks and municipal noises with her engine growl.

and even the family across the street, whose coop was clucking
into the morning din, sighed relief through breakfast curtains
as her roughness dissipated into sea fog and
the chickens finally quieted down, perhaps though just because
enough of their work was done to quiet into Wednesday dawn.

that afternoon I wondered what the other neighbor noticed
as he gathered his cooler, mask and hardhat from the passenger seat
of his little red truck, the one he parks across from our front door
did he hear you mumble in the street, crouched and staring
through sunglasses at a burst milkweed mess,
questioning the dry stems as you snipped carefully
around butterfly eggs and scrounged what’d gone to seed?
did he notice me in the sun spot on the steps,
looking on softly from below a furrowed brow,
nose atwitch at the sharp smell of sliced stems wafting up the walk from your workstation,
or was he as lost in a thought as we were, perhaps blind to everything but a summer moment, last year
when his daughter bounced
out of the passenger door and soccer-cleat kicked that truck’s bumper
affectionately, her cheeks aglow from a well fought win, his too.

I wonder this as I hear Kate across the street clanging dishes through an open window, as she laughs in her kitchen, preparing dinner
and the crows caw in waves, hummingbirds cackle at our too brown salvia,
and you sweep the sidewalk smooth.

time flounders forward
still, I am shining my boots
unafraid to go