Long Marriage
You’re worried, so you wake her
& you talk into the dark:
Do you think I have cancer, you
say, or Were there worms
in that meat, or Do you think
our son is OK, and it’s
wonderful, really—almost
ceremonial as you feel
the vessel of your worry pass
miraculously from you to her—
Gee, the rain sounds so beautiful,
you say—I’m going back to sleep.
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2005 by Gerald Fleming. Reprinted from “Swimmer Climbing onto Shore,” by Gerald Fleming, Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, 2005, by permission of the author.