Their wedding picture mocked them from the table,
These two whose minds no longer touched each other.
They lived with such a heavy barricade between them
That neither battering ram of words
Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.
Somewhere, between the oldest child’s first tooth
And the youngest daughter’s graduation,
They lost each other.
Throughout the years each slowly unraveled
That tangled ball of string called self,
And as they tugged at the stubborn knots,
Each hid his searching from the other.
Sometimes she cried at night
And begged the whispering darkness to tell her who she was.
He lay beside her, snoring like a hibernating bear,
Unaware of her winter.
Once, after they had made love,
He wanted to tell her how afraid he was of dying,
But, fearing to show his naked soul,
He spoke instead about the beauty of her breasts.
She took a course in modern art,
Trying to find herself in colors splashed upon a canvas,
Complaining to other women about men who are insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called “The Office,”
Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures,
And buried himself in customers.
Slowly, the wall between them rose,
Cemented by the mortar of indifference.
One day, reaching out to touch each other
They found a barrier they could not penetrate,
And recoiling from the coldness of the stone,
Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies, it is not in a moment of angry battle,
Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting, exhausted,
Expiring at the bottom of a wall it could not scale.
By Anonymous
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