Love's Short Grammar

Whether we should take out
the gift-wrapped Scrabble at
our age: difficult consonants,
easy vowels. For memory's
sake work old crosswords.
Our prolix neighbors
we hear through walls
one apartment over
the abyss. They play euchre,
catch eleven o'clock weathers.
They're old lovers.

We argue about this
contingent mood, in its soft
voice feel encroachments
of a new hard spell. A shift to
irrecoverable pasts. Hard objects
in indirect greens, roses. Lilies
in creeping shadows. We tense
up. Fear the future's vaunted
perfection. Free cross-grained
conditionals, like petals
floating down, miss us: love's O
rising like the kiss of air.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Bense All rights reserved
from Readings in Ordinary Time
The Backwaters Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission