Together

All my life I was face to face with her, at meal-times, by the fire, even in the ultimate intimacies of the bed. You could have asked, then, for information about her? There was a room apart she kept herself in, teasing me by leading me to its glass door, only to confront me with my reflection. I learned from her even so. Walking her shore I found things cast up from her depths that spoke to me of another order, worshipper as I was of untamed nature. She fetched her treasures from art’s storehouse: pieces of old lace, delicate as frost; china from a forgotten period; a purse more valuable than anything it could contain. Coming in from the fields with my offering of flowers I found her garden had forestalled me in providing civilities for my desk. ‘Tell me about life,’ I would say, ‘you who were its messenger in the delivery of our child.’ Her eyes had a fine shame, remembering her privacy being invaded from further off than she expected. ‘Do you think death is the end?’ frivolously I would ask her. I recall now the swiftness of its arrival wrenching her lip down, and how the upper remained firm, reticent as the bud that is the precursor of the flower.