Before the Fireplace: December, 1993

When forty-four summers have touched your face
And sown long furrows beside your eyes
When restless nights suck sleep and trace
Faint memories of our children’s cries,
If I’m asked where autumn’s beauty resides
Where the seed of light and love endures
I’ll look beyond to the field and confess
It elides, eludes, yet somehow ensures
We persist in seeking that which if found
Would bear us away to that wintertime
-Over twenty years the world’s spun round-
Since first we met and Inward Light would shine
Within your eyes, your laughing eyes, the evergreen,
The night, the crèche, my winter life set free.

—after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2