...Troth unto Troth...

Color-blind by design, way 

back before they were sexed, 

being anatomically incorrect, 

they became the best of friends. 

Indeed, it would literally be years 

before she would find him blue, 

and he find her pink. 

Until then they homogeneous; 

their rainbows shades of grey. 

They kinder in their garden, 

absent apple, vacant snake, 

hand in hand, before the fall. 

They learn of sugar and spice, 

   of puppy dog tails. 

That girls will be girls 

and boys will be boys, 

and both in turn are ucky, 

nay icky, nay just plain gross. 

That the only way 

you’d ever find each other 

holding hands was 

during a dreaded fire drill. 

“Over my dead body!” as it were. 

This long before they’d learn to long. 

Yet they resolve to evolve, 

and puberty soon arrives. 

She now anatomically quite correct;

he nothing more than erect. 

Of this they dare not say a word, 

for the greatest act of intimacy 

that a boy and girl could ever know 

would be that of holding hands. 

 That is, until that perilous moment 

when each one’s respective 

tooth and tongue comes in 

close proximity to the other, 

and all that negates 

the pending rend of flesh 

is the fortuitous presence 

   of purse and pout. 

That one pair of lips might 

choose to gnaw at another’s 

and there find it somehow erotic 

is the strangest of dire desires. 

Oh, and the taunt and titillation 

their tongues were want to do

was pucker peculiar indeed. 

And then they in the 

back seat of a car 

where frantic furtive hands 

werepermittedfelicitous functions 

other than that of holding the other. 

And it wasn’t long after this that 

their hands came to find 

each other again; they 

troth unto troth connubial. 

And they come to produce a child 

who at its striven best 

could manage to wrap 

the whole of its minute hand 

about the smallest of their fingers. 

 And it’s only a moment later 

that this same hand 

comes to wave as it 

heads off for school and beyond. 

Once boy and girl, 

now woman and man, 

   husband and wife, 

      mother and father, 

they now as aging couple alone, 

ensconced upon a porch swing, 

pensive hand within that of the other, 

waiting for that wistful wave to return. 

Decades tick by 

as if passing seconds, 

and here the only waves 

that greet forsaken eyes 

are those from the hands 

of an apathetic clock. 

Forlorn lovers whose liver-spot hands 

cling one to the other as vines entwined. 

They there embraced

beneath liniment layers of flannel 

   and blanket cerement. 

Each with dread of morning’s arrival; 

there finding the other’s hand 

cold to the touch. 

That this clutch of one’s warmth 

within the ardor of another’s 

should ever come to end. 

That there will 

inevitably come a time 

where one remains above ground; 

the other’s remains below. 

That now wizened hands 

might come to reach forth 

in quest of a beloved other, 

yet there grasp naught 

but ethereal void.

And then… 

And then that given grace 

when they as lovers are 

once again found beneath blanket, 

though this 

be a blanket 

of earth. 

And here both come to germinate. 

Remains here rendered rhizome, 

they two as root resurrected; 

hand unto hand once again. 

Dirt to dirt. 

Love unto loam. 

Once they were two, 

and now… 

they both are one. 

Ó2019 Jack David Hubbell