After the lunch has been made and the breakfast done
and the cats are fed and the child has left for school,
it’s no small thing to slide back into bed with your partner.
Before coffee. Before the day takes you separate ways.
Before phone, before bills, before the endless list.
With the earth ever spinning toward tomorrow,
it’s no small thing to eschew the work, the work out, the walk,
and choose instead to map your naked body to his, to reenter
the realm of rumpled sheets and meet in the temple of touch.
Decades of choices, most of them small. This is how a life
is made, the clothes in a heap on the floor, the air in the room
so quiet, so cool, your bodies together so warm.