A Moment in Time

Smoothing the clothespin wrinkles
from a crisp cotton sheet
that smells like damp grass
after a violent thunderstorm,

I lie in the crook
of my husband’s arm
on a sunny Saturday
afternoon.

All urgent pressing chores,
they disappear
and it is as if
we’ve built a sphere

around us, just the two
of us, and the cat
who lays under the dust ruffle
sweeping under the bed

with her tail as gris
as the lambent shadows
she paints on the gray
weathered floor boards,

playing with the
tail end of an tangle
of yellowed
extension cords.

You know, a mere moment in time
that seems to last an eternity,
that you produce
from a few intangible seconds,
just before you fall asleep,

The kind of space you create
with walls as substantial as
gritty gray cinderblocks
and the air so thick that
even the ringing of
the telephone can’t permeate,

but the humming of the
air conditioner can,
rocking you to sleep
as gently as a warm
summer breeze
in a smoothly swaying hammock
suspended by hummingbirds.

Sure, the roof needs mending,
the garden needs tending,
mail needs sending,
money needs spending,
because bills are pending,

but this story,
it has no ending.
I breathe in his scent
and burn it to the hard drive

of my memory,
a task and test
to which there can be
no failing.

For 36 years I’ve laid in this very spot,
watching my muddy brown hair turn gray,
making reservations
for this same indentation

for ubiquitous eternities more.
Sure, in the future
we may be separated for a while
by that black ditch of death,

but I am confident
that if we were to meet
a hundred years from now,
my gray hair stuck up in a bun,

and my gray cat on my arm,
my long gray skirt
dragging the gray dust,
wandering the murky gray twilight,
on some unpaved, overgrown backwoods road,
deep in the hills of West Virginia,

where so long tarried
my love and I,
and I were deaf
and also blind,
still…

his aroma would rekindle
a spark of remembrance
of this very moment in time,

and I would plant
a kiss square on
his lovely lips
and place into his outstretched hand
what he’s been waiting for so long,
the returning of
his
rib,
so we could sleep
in peace.