Golden Wedding Anniversary

I had Grandmother sunny side up,

smiling and eager, pigtailed and perfect,

as she was fifty years ago,

approximately,

both of us married to someone else,

glad to snap into this stabler chemistry,

productive at once, a daughter, a son,

like the hydrogen bumps you see on water

in schematic pictures of how it is,

thereafter part of the human river,

en route to an ocean beyond knowing,

our only real knowledge, ourselves,

if that, for never was it certain,

this fact that we are—

married fifty love-lingering years,

as if nothing could ever have been better—

though it couldn’t.