After years you know this:
that the course of reliable love runs
not through a slough of habit

but along a curving hillside
where even familiar landscape
offers daily surprises.

Those palms, those pine trees
outside the window, that stretch
of shoreline, this sleeping face,

so surprisingly familiar, still
catch you unawares in
a shock of recognition.

What you have done before
you do again:  you say yes.
You wake, and turn, and are thankful

to rise even from the happiest dream
into what, solid, factual, still strange,
you keep choosing.

Practice makes more deliberate
the thing you’ve done a thousand times,
each time an act of consent:

you pour the coffee
you feed the cat
you turn off the bedside lamp,

loving the simple labors
of shared life, loving
the changing light, evening and morning

and the currents of dailiness that run
deep under the whitecaps
and the waves.