Anniversary
September 2
So handsome you were,
so pretty me
hot
real hot
hottest day of the year
four in the afternoon
we sizzled our way up the aisle
I giggled through the I do's
It's what I do when I'm nervous
You didn't flinch
but you squeezed my hand.
You were solid
We were solid
It was hot.
Shiny and bedazzled
smiles so radiant you still need sunglasses
just to look at the pictures.
You'd think we'd have known
with our fine educations
that objects will assume the temperature of their surroundings
unless energy is added.
Some things you can learn in a classroom.
Others take experience.
Free thinkers and skeptics need more of the latter
so we lived in defiance
of thermodynamics
a perpetual motion machine.
But Joule was right.
Winters were bitter
frozen
motionless
grey.
You quit squeezing my hand.
I quit giggling.
You became hollow.
We became hollow.
so hollow that when
I recalled a giggle one day
you flinched.
The icy shell shattered.
The heat of the explosion
was only enough
to melt the shards,
slowly wept away,
fresh blood of casualty in the wake.
Bathed in experience's lessons
healing salts of time
scabs give way to tender scars
and feeling reemerges.
I noticed it this summer
the warmth.
It's been hot.
May you feel it, too,
and be
Happy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nancy Jones
SOFT SENSUALITY
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