marriage
michael t. corrigan
November chains the dark
and through its frozen dream,
the white flakes fall. You twist
the raveled ends and knit my heart.
Touch: this is what love was. Fingers rake
the windowpanes; you sip
from a cracked mug adn shiver;
the gale rips at our housešs skin,
shrieks at crabbed, denuded trees.
The furnace kicks in, and memory:
your eyes are wells in the light
of the lamp, fingertips turn
yarn into patterned years. I hold
my hands up, warm them by the fire of you.
You puff the lamp out, we embrace,
then enter the black throat of the cave.
All of it unravels now.
I have no song for it, have no
words. Our penance is familiar.
We huddle, we thirst, we die.
It has always been like this, and yet
we pretend, we dream, we donšt know why.
