Or sometimes watched drifting with the leaves,
some last confetti of yellow or brown. Or it existed
the way the juncos huddled beneath the thistle
feeder in winter, in the way the clouds spilled water
in May to soak the ground. Once we found it
in the attic in a steamer trunk, and another time
we closed it in a suitcase and drove it across
the countryside to Ohio. And often we imagined that
the years were a locked door against which
we kept knocking to be admitted. And on the dresser
of the new house, I spilled the change of the marriage
into a heap, and later we sat on the back porch and watched
the nuptial clouds on their conveyor belts. And we slept
at night with the breaths of the marriage around us.
Copyright © 2018 Doug Ramspeck. This poem originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Summer 2018. Used with permission of the author.