Old Couples

Anne asks me to stop sending her pictures of cute old couples when I travel.
It’s depressing! she texts after my That’s us someday! under eighty-somethings 
in Iowa City, walking ahead of me into town under an August blue sky.
They’d finally found the same easy pace: she with her walker, he with his cane. 

My mother groans at the silver-haired couples at her assisted living, 
reminded of the ache in her hip where dad, even more in dementia, 
had been firmly attached—now only in dreams. Sometimes I watch her sleep, 
her eyes fluttering beneath pale lids, her fingers curling as if holding a hand.

Bob pedals next to me at the town gym: tall, ramrod straight. The caretaker’s
off today so his wife sits in a chair by the door, hemmed in by her walker. 
She thinks she’s just returned from her mother’s wedding in Toledo. 
Long trip, I said. She frowned, nodded at Bob. Ask him if he’s done. 

She was nineteen when I married her, Bob says after I say it’s got to be tough. 
It is what it is, he says, ennobling the old cliché. We’ve had 62 good years.

JACK POWERS

Jack Powers is the author of Everybody’s Vaguely Familiar. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 Connecticut River Review Poetry Contests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 Rattle Poetry Prizes. Visit his website: jackpowers13.com/poetry.