a reuleaux triangle attached to the ball
the curved aluminum clunk on the heel
with one stomp, i give my power to you

silencing my screams, you yell for me
with every brush and scuff, you sing a song
of an endless symphony

yet, when naked, you move like an animal
a quick pounce, your point sharp,
taking flight, soaring
like a bird turning
from snake to angel back
to a wildebeest hitting the marley-floor
with nothing but a soft patter
your energy escaping back
into the earth ready
for your next adventure

I was ten weeks
And a day
You were two years eleven weeks
And a day

My mother said
"Just shove the spoon in her mouth!"

"Safety first!"
Wasn't really a mantra for
Our moms

Our lives are a Venn diagram
Like an eclipse

Of plastic play ice cubes
Bobbled from hand to hand
To stave off imaginary frostbite
And tap shoes tied with elastic
To aid in afterschool
In-the-car quick-changes

Of consonant digraphs and isolated syllables
Freed from the missalette
And our expelation
Expelled with elation
From the pew
To the loo
For giggling during the sermon

Of listening to the phone ring
Ten times
Twenty times
Two hundred times
Waiting for an answer
Or the invention
And acquisition
Of an answering machine

And they are Euler circles

Of mothers swapping strollers
Like Garanimal parenting
Matching blue elephants to abandonment and estrangement

Of a career plan spanning decades and
Of decades of unplanned careers
Careening into a pile-up of
"This one time, at this one job . . . ."

Of husbands and babies on one side
And solitude and seeking on the other

But we have always had
Our intersection

Through my scholastic continental pinball of a life
And your need for small spaces
Like a guru on a mountain top
Sought but secure
Our Reuleaux triangle
Is a magnet pulling us
To overlapping searches
For intelligent life and enlightenment
Our radical center
A pile of curling Instamatic photographs
Grainy and greening
Awesomeness and awkwardness and 80's hairstyles
Attempted in spite of our curls

Our intersection where
224-3628 and 226-6202
Meshed and became a difference of two

The sameness of experience
The polarization of exploration
And the return to

Ravioli
Malfatti
French bread
And family we build on a foundation of

Fifty-one years four months two weeks
And a day