Between Us

We sit on the couch,
you with The Economist,
me with my novel,
space between us wide.
Though our toes touch,
I see you through a mist.
Who are you? I don’t
know anymore.
We have a child and everything else
is forgotten between us.

What was our shared life,
those nine months before his conception?
I cannot remember dating,
courtship, a bottle of wine,
dinners authored together.
Now you absorb news of the world,
and I, some other person’s story,
our private narratives lost to silence.

We don’t know how to be together yet
with that invisible sleeping child between us.

When we met I wanted to know your past,
to imagine your life before me.
We were old already, forty years,
eighty between us. What was your narrative?
I wanted to tell you mine. It would take a long time.

Then, our child,
the couch, print in our eyes.

From here your heart specks the horizon,
and my desire enormous and mute
leans, reaches, fingers through silence
towards you.