40th Wedding Anniversary

“You were always more celibate than me”

Overheard in a restaurant

There is the question of how he spends his share of the universal force—

most of it ghosting into gloriously wanton dreams, the rest is permitted

corporeality, once belittled as his needs (presented with hesitant apology).

It is convenient that his music neither swells nor rises through the scales,

that stops are never pulled out (though they both sense the tune’s thinness).

He proved ethical (or sacrificial) when wanted by a woman who showed—

with two segments removed from a satsuma—how he might lick her (juice

running down her chin). He declined the desert menu—just a coffee and the bill

but recognised an honest invitation never to be received from the far side

of the marital bed, to mutual, shameless self-revelation in open-eyed play.

Instead, they have something else—walk the dog, take one coffee a day,

live like two horses grazing peacefully, each aware of where the other is.