'Wife Poem'

And it's clear at last, she dropped
down from the moon, not like some
sylphy Cynthia at Delphi, after all she's
not seventeen, but with the sexual
grace and personal implacability
of a goddess of our time; so he says to
himself at night seeing the glow
of her sleep in her half (two-thirds really)
of their bed, the claire de lune of her shoulder
and forehead behind the deep clouds
of her hair. He drinks his wine
and swallows more pills. The birds
make their first aubade, little chirps and
chitterings, and outside the first light
mists their window. The day will be awful,
nervy and dull and sullen. His last
cigarette, his final gulp of chardonnay,
and he presses against her warm glow,
thinking of how he swam as a boy
of twelve in the warm pond beyond
the elms and hickories at the meadow's
edge. He turned like a sleepy carp among
the water lilies, under the dragonflies
and hot clouds of the old days of summer.

	-- Hayden Carruth