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The Love Song of Mrs. Jones
The voices of the children are like tinkling glass
And for a moment
Their song is all I hear.
A ray of morning sun shines through the window,
Skips atop the baby girl’s sandy curls
And lands on my folded hands.
Once slender and smooth,
They now creak and bend as one tries to smooth away
The wrinkles of the other.
I do not tell them how you held that hand
As Sade played,
Because they would not understand that it wasn’t love.
Was it.
They do not know how friends can sit in silence
And just comfortably be
Like you and me.
But even in the silence
The words danced between us.
They hovered above our heads mid-conversation,
Ever threatening, but never managing,
To manifest themselves into something other than a thing.
A thing we had once
At times
Still
Always
And now I sit here gazing at these beautiful children
Who are not yours,
Listening to the shuffling of the morning paper
In the hands of a still-strong, black man
Who is not you.
I think we knew, even then
We would live our lives out separately,
Happily.
But today
When my grandkids asked me to explain “forever”
I wanted to tell them your name.
AFH
6/7/07
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