Today you're lucky, in love with your wife <br />for the first time in weeks, both of you <br />out for a walk in the overgrown park. <br />No need to hold hands <br />like that sadly animate couple <br />you can see through a clearing <br />on a parallel path. <br />She lets <br />go and turns from him. You notice <br />how in their weather misery hangs <br />faintly familiar in the cold shadows. <br />As if having recently unlearned <br />the habit of empathy, the sky <br />over their forest seems to laugh <br />at whatever they say, a woman <br />turning from a man, their dog <br />flexed on a heap of duff <br />pretending to study the sparrows. <br />Now the woman feigns confidence, <br />stepping gracefully <br />away. Two lives severed <br />irrevocably. <br />Such a capricious drug, <br />the present. Look for instance <br />at this woman's immediate future. <br />Like yourself once, she will forget <br />the names of old haunts, her voice <br />a clever imposter, someone else <br />filling her mouth, not with words, <br />but vocables intending her own worth. <br />Or right now: how all of these thoughts <br />have occurred to you in a flash. <br />When you look up, your wife's vanished. <br />But really she's there, of course, <br />off the path, among the ancient <br />waist-high grasses, holding out to you <br />a single mutable wildflower <br />burning in its own ochre light. <br />From here to that flower exist <br />no guarantees. Best to get on with it.<br /><br />Kevin Clark<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/parallel-paths/
