My Good Wife Poem by David McLansky

A handsome woman
Walking up the road
Making a mercy visit
To a neighbors house;
I note that
Your hips carry a matron’s load
As I watch you through the window
Laboring up the hill from our abode’
Even now at sixty
There is no overly perfumed pride in your step
No self awareness of your beauty
Your strong legs climb the hill
Only motivated by charity and civic duty;
This is the face that bows to me each evening
Those are the lips that kiss my hands each night
Your forehead bent
In whispered prayers that I will
Sleep all right
That my health will not implode
That my soul not disappear
In some minor cataclysmic event