Wifely Admissions, Even after all these Years
by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas There are nights my worries try to escape like little souls climbing from the dead. I feel your arms outspread in my dreams, your face teased by the hint of midnight’s zeal. There are nights I listen for a thousand birds to land on leaves as if that whoosh could soothe a man to sleeping while troubled with a whisper of desire, the way a child looks of innocence and guilt after anything forbidden they deem worth doing, after anything worth doing they deem forbidden. “Do you love me?” I ask. “I love us," you say. I am on the verge of breathing one prayer upon another as if a litany of psalms has spilled from the moon’s curve into midair and slipped through an open window. There are nights I’m lost to the touch of skin the way a hint of cognac seduces the senses even the tongue full from the exhaustion of love. I sense your body curving to mine, collapsing around me, every part of you pulling me inside out, unveiling that which I’ve never unveiled as if you could save me from all terrors I’ve yet to share. There are nights I’m drunk with rain, a girl spinning towards the storm and you appear like the safe haven I have yet to name; a place unfound. Yet some terrors are not for sharing. They sound needy. Unmindful of the constant that is you, dazed by my fear of losing that which I cannot bear to lose. There are nights I am thumbing through pages of my mother’s book as though a message was left or folded in the crook, beyond the turning or somewhere outside the universe. Stay here forever, say the lights in the room stay here until we are only a flicker of what once was, an apparition holding onto the vision of us. There are nights I have forgotten the pleasures of living. I have forgotten the splendor of lavender at surmise. I want to tell you how beautiful you are I try to remember you have my father’s eyes. |
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