Eve Jones

Wedding Night
By Eve Jones

It's the same apartment, only brighter,
when we come home. By now, I know
all the geographies of your body: the glass
sea of your back, the chin's tropic, lip's strata,
an unidentified lump on your wrist since
you were seven. You wait, supine
in the sheets, and I take off my pearl earrings.
Outside the bathroom window, January midnight
floats blue, plane lights glittering in all phases
of exit. Turning to the sink, I drop a pearl into
the drain, my mother's gift today. You come naked,
bearing tools and sighing, wanting me.
In a pile of ruffles and teary palms, I watch
from the floor as you kneel at the old pipes,
twisting metal this way and that. In the dark water
of the pipe's curve suddenly you find it, turn back to me
with the pearl cupped, smiling. Uncurling your fingers,
this I know: all I will ever say to you I could say right now,
as we laugh about it and lie down together,
all the small departures moving overhead,
time like any flawed thing, attempting itself,
a pearl rolling in the open hand.

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