To My Wife
by Hale Chatfield 



Can it be true? Have we again
signed with our bodies' tenderest affinities
that enigmatic order blank? If you say
it's so, it must be so: you're always first,
quite naturally, to make sense of the words
the moon writes on your femininity.

And do you frown to read my wonder, my surprise,
as some complex anthology of awe
and diffidence, of pride and anguish,
jubilation and remorse? Gentle reader,
scanner of psychic skies, you've always seen
love's orbit's full of tears and always known
the tail of passion's comet is a shower of little cries;

nor can you miss the fact that all love's sighs
finally end in paradox, that what we buy
with life is death, that those with whom we joy
to be must always leave us or themselves be left
and who can tell us what this girl or boy
will be: to us bereaver or by us bereft?



                                  Hale is the creator of:

                                  Poetry Power: The Internet Center for Poets
                                  http://www.poetrypower.com