People can love each other, for some reason.
The man and woman walk toward me,
a mass of contradictions,
she’s Asian and fat,
he’s white and nerdy thin, glasses, baseball hat and sweat.
He pushes the baby cart like
it’s loaded with the last scrap of coal from the mine:
none of it is pretty,
her breasts stick out in her pink shirt,
like they and she aren’t sure anymore which way to go,
he looks like he smells,
even from a great distance,
the kids twitching in their awkward sleep in the big stroller.
But something keeps him pushing,
and her striding beside him,
maybe it’s their mortgage,
the interest too high, the crush of credit cards,
his up-tight parents, her widowed mother
silently wishing her daughtered’d married Japanese,
maybe it’s the kids, the constant reassurance
of their presence, a tangible tribute
to union, a chain tied to both of them,
but maybe, underneath all that sweat and
extra weight, something still
breathes between them, something the
mortgage kids inlaws neighbors
can’t touch,
a place,
that comes at night,
laying together,
the day gone away,
sleep not yet engulfing them,
and he says something she doesn’t hear, but feels
and she folds into him, and
his hands rest on her,
and a space is formed between them,
a small and sleepy place,
filled every night by the flowing
flesh of two people too tired,
to do anything
but exist here, in this
continent that no one
sees, but that they return to each night,
silent and knowing.
