Anniversary Memento by Cathryn Shea

Anniversary Memento

I throw on my housecoat
so before breaking the fast
I can fetch the morning paper,
that archaic medium for news.
Then time to remove accumulations
of body and soul. I mean bathe.
The long détente of parenting
and employment years behind us.
It’s our anniversary.
Instead of a bejeweled gift
I will settle for a carafe
or crockpot. An inverse memento mori,
interlocking cells of marriage spilling.
I know my husband in our housewares.
Having brushed him with my tongue
many years during our misdemeanor
home life, era more like error,
with its dabbling in booze and drugs,
and slamming of doors.
There was a brief Paradiso Terrestre,
fleeting cataracts of Edens.
Now our routine is forgiving,
my conscience feels swaddled.
I resist anxiety. Never mind remorse
that we didn’t behave better
in this earthly life, as I dream we did
in a nocturnal shadow life.
I cede to acceptance, this bundle of years.
*

Cathryn Shea’s second full-length poetry collection, “Ghost Matinee,” will be published in 2025. Her first is “Genealogy Lesson for the Laity” (both with Unsolicited Press). A Best of the Net nominee, Cathryn’s poetry has been in several anthologies and appears in Rust + Moth, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Gargoyle, and widely elsewhere. Cathryn served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology, and she’s a fourth-generation northern Californian living with her family in Fairfax, CA. See cathrynshea.com