How to Measure a Near Quarter of a Century

How to Measure a Near Quarter

of a Century

The room of love is another world.

You go there wearing no watch,

watching no clock.  It is the world

without end, so small that two

people can hold it in their arms,

and yet it is bigger than worlds

on worlds…

                        Hannah Coulter

                        Wendell Berry

What time doesn’t measure, or can’t:

It measures the length of day and dark

but not the depth of it, how a child

tracing a line in the sand is later

plotting a house then a lot for ash

and bone a whole four hours

from size to open to close.

It measures this the last twenty five years

we walked in then out on each other

before and while we were married, it levels

your glance with a carpenter’s L

and tries to tell us, like an old house settled,

of the discrepancy between

the front of the door to the back—inches!

difference, and how for the length

of time we were married we accepted-

adapted to the slant until one day (I’ll say

it was you but we both had our pants

down) the grip relaxed and it was

and still is a letting go.  And see

that’s not measurable either, even instruments

as mark, needle and dark, wave after wave

of shock once the cliff (before it falls)

opens its mouth, parts its strong mossy

lips and kisses and gropes and buggers 

in every warning it can raise and see, I fell

in and to save yourself you unhanded me 

and let go miles and miles and miles

before I hit bottom.  I don’t blame you.

Even you didn’t know who you were.  Still,

in every dream I have of you, the ten years

we knew and ploughed and knew some more

were blunt shovels, toys in a dirt

pile.  Dented buckets.  Dented cars.  Scabs

and scars and under the skin ruptured blood.

It’s never been wiped away or cleaned. 

Abandoned, we turned our backs.  It’s still

there when I look.  Still smells the same,

sounds the same, tastes the same.  But what’s

unmeasureable, in all that turning and walking

away is the grip of aching to let go.

To let go and watch you watch me walk

up to you in my sleep and see how

you shift in your chair and clear your throat

and, rising, crack your spine.  It etches

its seismograph tack, its thin ink line, deep

into this still darkening dark, and I marvel,

don’t you marvel, that the distance between

you and me, these last thirteen years

we haven’t seen each other, is so close, in this 

dream, it’s so close it’s never ever undreamed.