Housekeeping

Perhaps in your world, there isn’t an obvious

measure for love; neither spoken nor tactile.
You line the morning hours with house chores
and leave me to find my pace and place in coffee;
a sometimes whispered word of maternal concern.

Some days I notice the roughening of your hands,
the callous way the seasons have coated them
with the essence of decades. Some days I spy the fine
threads of fragility, the way a spider, wary of world,
has spun them; like how you weave your silent act
of house chores into a web of love and order. Outside,

the potted plants lay down their drift of leaves as I tiptoe
through the sparkling threshold. Knowing you’d blended
yourself into the TV drama once more.