There are habits not well understood by others,
and not everyone knows the pleasures of a marsh
at dawn, as steam from a flask of coffee rises
with clouds that lift themselves from their night
in the cattails, and with a careful ear one can
tune in the flat grumbling of a mallard family.
We don’t know of this, either, but if I write it

and you read it then it is something imagined
together, and you feel your boots sink into muck
as I fool with my binoculars to peer into
the shadowed, rustling grasses. So a marriage
imagined, and what is it? It is not
the papers on the coffee table. It does not sit
on the mantel, framed in walnut. It is the hands

of the clock running backwards each fall, confused
by satellites, tree limbs vaulting into the yard,
the knife, fork, spoon, napkin, plate, glass
set each evening at the table. It is the sunflowers
lifting their heads above us on a city street,
enclosing us in their small field, under a moon
we imagine will follow us home.