What we had was tenuous, but we held
out through the winter, despite chills
so severe you could actually feel the house
contracting. All night, each night
we huddled, as separate as our twin
beds would permit us, listening
with brittle-eared acerbity
to the phthisical cough-wracked radiators,
doing their damnedest but failing;
listening, and rustling in our places,
wondering what there would be to say if there ever
again would be real conversation. Then
one morning it dawns we are no longer
arguing. Bright light prisms through shutters.
The day is an equinox. We reach:
our fingers uncertain, as tentative and ambiguous
as in a Renaissance portrait, across
the bed-brain-winter-but-now-melting barrier.