Collision

Inch by inch, year upon year

we rub each other the wrong way.

Your devastation at my anger,

our laser focus on our son.

How you slept in the guest room after your mother died,

how my loneliness made me awkward.

We were better looking before we got fat,

lost some teeth, grew turkey necks, gray hair.

But like the land mass of the Pacific plate

as it dives beneath the North American,

you make me laugh, which can’t be faked,

like being caught off-guard.

Your clear singing voice, my need to provide,

a shifting bedrock after earthquake and storm.

Like the mountains of Big Sur,

green jagged cliffs rising from the blue,

we yield, force our lives beneath the other’s,

at the place where our edges meet.