People like us

The numbers are important: it has been twenty years,
more than twenty years. Still, he is always home at six, exactly.
I have prepared the table, and the vegetables. Something
has been cooking all afternoon that we will finish together

later, but before that he throws his arms around my shoulders
and kisses me on the neck. We have a drink and talk.
Like all companions we have a secret language, and a world
within the outward world where characters, known only there

sub-plots, imaginings, laughter, have private lives and meaning.
Then, when it is time to eat, we go to the kitchen and agree
on how to serve. Did you know that in the Bible it says
be subject to each other? It means, I think, he is first, always.

It means, he thinks, I am always first. We assess the wine.
He is better at this than I am. At this, and many other things.
I am better at the jokes, I think, but we share a taste for the absurd.
Everything and everyone is discussed. No one has the final word.

Then there is a handful of hauntingly beautiful scenes, a girl
in a red coat, a crumbling beach house, the installation
of the finished bell, to be recounted later in a dream, music
and poetry piling up in a great heap of life.

For us there is nothing ever new under the sun.
In the place beyond the city where we escape
debates and news—where it is useless to mention
politics because there are no roads or pathways

and there is no right or wrong—people like us, lie down
in the grass, and for a minute there we lose ourselves
the sky too quiet to talk about, and we can be nothing
actually nothing, nothing at all, if not together, not as one.