Poem for My Husband on His Birthday at Summer Solstice

In this photo, my husband Ben sits in the middle between our dear friend, Sergio Troncoso, and me at the 2017 AWP national conference.

Today is his birthday and the summer solstice. In less than two weeks on the Fourth of July, we will have been living together as a couple for 29 years, and on December 27th, we'll be legally married for 25 years. So I wanted to post a poem I'd written for him to celebrate his birthday and the Solstice.

I've written many poems for him, including the title poem of my chapbook of passionate love poems, Skin Hunger. But in today's solstice heat, I thought I'd post the one I wrote about the day after we arrived home from our honeymoon when he ventured out after an overnight ice storm for the newspaper and fell on the ice. It seemed to offer insights into the risky act of marriage itself.

WALKING ON ICE

after a back injury is a constant

putting yourself at risk.

I know this fear well

from years of setting nerve-damaged heel

firmly on glazed cement

that may turn banana peel on me

as if in some eternal silent film gag.

For you, it’s all new—

the discovery that solid earth can shift

you from upright to supine

as soon as the water on its surface hardens.

We age by learning

such hard truths, move through life

gingerly testing our footing, or else

by smashing the brittle in our way

and sweeping the shards

from the sidewalk.

It’s not so hard, learning

to balance on the shine.

Published in Heart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)