Tracy K. Smith

Some of my favorite poems are about love, long love, day-to-day love.  "When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me" is one such poem.  When marriage heaves with the weight of parental responsibility, there is sanctity in the bedroom.  It is a place to talk without interruption--a place for passion.  It is a safe-haven which ironically--because of passion--prolongs the years of parenthood.  We are born of parents' desire, and that is some kind of magic.

When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me

by Tracy K. Smith

I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed:

Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter.

Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor.

The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth

On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through

By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks

Night after night upon that room. You must have watched

For what felt like forever, wanting to be

What we passed back and forth between us like fire.

Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying

To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.

From what dream of world did you wriggle free?

What soared—and what grieved—when you aimed your will

At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?

Tracy K Smith  

Link to Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize winning book Life on Mars.

(It's on my Amazon wishlist.)