When December days are warmer
than they should be, and no one is home,
everyone scattered like dust in different corners
of this city, I sit on the porch and wait
for you.
Arriving without any
of our five children (God bless my mother),
you lead me hand-in-hand into the empty house
that now feels more like a church, a holy space
made up of diagonal light and quiet.
Marriage is a sacrament, they say, a sign
of the sacred.
Outside the house, cars roll down James
Street. Outside the house, people leave the barber’s
smelling of after-shave, the wind pulling at
their new hair. Outside the house, December takes
the last leaf from the ancient sycamore. Is there
anything outside the house that knows
of the holy space between us? The way diagonal
light gently rests on rounded sheets? Or
how, later, you hold my hand and we slip inside
a merciful sleep?
Marriage is a sacrament, they say, a sign
of the sacred.