Under the Maple Trees

After the poem "Noon" by Louise Glück

They're older — elderly, really,
but still before dying:
that space of knowing imminent departure
prior to evaporation.

The small house breathes in
the couple's scent of soap
and attic —
early summer cool enough in the Ohio Valley
that the window units stay dormant.

These two lead me to think all old matrimonies
live out beneficent, minimal lives —
the lawn and the rooms expanding with the years
until they cover entire kingdoms and natural preserves.

They have nothing anyone wants,
yet so much peace and quiet they cannot
keep it for themselves — it seems to unfold
and tumble from the carpets and floral wallpaper,
flooding out the back porch.

Sunlight spills at a young angle
through the maple trees, pooling into a pond
in the backyard.  Later I learn
two people moving like barges through the oily water of time
rarely live quietly — at some point they stop being adults
and become tree bark, dragon scale, chafing
the fluxed nerve of time.

So I look back on this portrait
where he loses his ring raking leaves in the backyard
and she grips the egg casserole in its pyrex
with her checkered, padded squares,
burning a thumb arched by arthritis
and wonder, as her shoot rises
through the bacon, toast, and gold-barred motes of dust:

what all they said
when they said nothing.

Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton holds an MFA from Texas State University.  His poetry collections are Excavator (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), Rain Minnows (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), and Slow Wind (Finishing Line Press), and his poetry appears in such journals as Windward Review, Driftwood, Voices de la Luna, Tiny Seeds Journal, and Sybil Journal.