You wake me and I bandage your toe,
me in my night gown, you already dressed,
I put my glasses on, and shake cobwebs from my brain.
It’s a cold, mostly gray, spring day,
and the sparrows are filling the yard with song.
With my brief glance out the picture window that overlooks the bay
I see the tide slipping out.
It is as if a great silvery silk curtain
with eiders embroidered on its surface
is slowly and steadily being drawn back.
But back to your toe, the infected one,
I clean and bandage it
You dress your feet,
We have a brief embrace at the kitchen door,
then off you go to work
as the lemony sun slides up from the horizon only to disappear
in the shrouded sky,
while I grab my pen to write.
This is our morning good-bye—a tender routine after 38 years.
Tomorrow the details will be different, but the love will be the same.
~Kathie Adams Brown (April 6, 2015)
aubade-music suitable to greeting the dawn or morning; a song about two lovers parting at dawn.
