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Poem for My Wife Younger Your father the union steward just starting to weld, your mother working the 2nd shift at the plastics plant. They had not even met when I was born in Bellevue a few floors from the lunatics decades later I almost envy for to live this life is to cage the hurt we carry to give it shape the scars in our skin unseen as the rain falls and you are asleep and the roof ’s music the snore of the dark in your slight breathing saws me. When you first saw me you said you wanted me to never be unseen and then the years of wreckage the empty bottles and the booze the fitful alterations of the rain restitching the dark’s fabric wind bowing the dogwoods and the pines creaking in the storm shaking the rusted steel shed where we still keep your father’s tools sharp enough to cut the dark the steady downpour of the dead. There is nothing more to say except when I was born there was a vacancy like an empty room inside my chest like the spaces between the rain. For years when I was falling forward I could feel you there in the absence of the air. 2020
