Once, my poor distracted wife
put her bra into the freezer, where I found it in the morning
stiff with frost. And once, she put rice
into the bottom of my cup of tea, mistaking it for sugar—
the rice, that is—thinking it would sweeten
the cloudy brown dregs, then handed it to me with a smile.
And once, wearing only her nightgown
and my laced-up hiking boots, she stepped daintily
out into the snow behind our house and waded
through three foot drifts like a bride lifting the hem of her skirt—
a memory clearer to me than our own wedding.
Sometimes love is not that serious, and what we love
is joy and the love joy brings. Though even that
is too complicated for what I feel when I recall her
standing in her garden in muddy overalls,
hands encased in thick gloves, rubber boots
up to her knees, a trowel or mulching fork in one of her hands.
Because love isn’t always formal, either,
decked out in evening gowns, carrying an expensive
handbag and wearing a string of pearls.
Mostly it’s frowzy and real, red-faced and smacking
its lips in the morning, a thread of dried blood
where the razor with its one keen tooth bit into a delicate ankle.
Love is there every day, the smell of cooking
in its hair, lips chaffed in the first frost,
argumentative and cross, crying at nothing,
then laughing hysterically at its own joke, or yours
as it trudges through snow or fishes a bra out of the freezer
where it has hibernated overnight. Seriously.