When the last child was born, we surmise,
they stopped. What else?

Then our first love comes, or lust, with its blur
of weekends of sheet-burned backs, of bedroom
smells, its privacies, its lunacies,
its irrefutable,
disconcerting,
adrenalized
bare facts.
This is a motion love only
rarely makes into a child. This is not
what we thought.
Try remarriage with kids. Young enough, or naive
enough, or well squared in denial, they know
nothing should be happening behind that door.
Flouting this is graver than dismantling Santa,
and the twin mystery and magic the same.
So, my mate and I, we try to be quiet, moan with our eyes,
nicker in the well of our chests, surge without banging
the furniture, sigh into each other’s necks
and dead lift the heft
of our passion like moon-wild thieves. Loving this.
And I want them well loved.
I imagine them sometimes, unsullied,
easing into it. Unafraid. I imagine them loving
the motion. Just
for the motion. The rapture
of never having baggage
to cast off, especially
the unwanted thought of parents,
naked, wide-eyed with lust, bearing the gift of all that flesh,
handing it down to them.