With what patience and need
Rose and I have loved each other these years.
All our twenties given…
our small wrinkles betray our investments
and our memories that lie sleeping behind our eyes
with all the distant wisdom
of a thousand photograph album pages.
Winter morning with she and my son sleeping around me
keeping me warm and secure
against the gray morning’s light.
We’ve all come so far together
to be here in this quiet hour.
Rose’s belly full now with her new child’s warmth
warms the bedroom’s dusk.
And Danny asleep beneath the window’s light
half grown
and I scribbling notes before they wake
beneath the lamp’s circle of light.
Today we’re still together after ten years
so much of my life’s time lays sleeping here.
Texas, separations, marriage, Danny’s birth
careers and college
it all lays sleeping here under my pen.
Rose, … who more than Rose is love to me?
She’s wife, lover, sister, mother
until I don’t know what she is to me.
gallagher
18 Feb 80
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —