The rush and blush of a new love often kickstarts the poetic impulse, but it’s so easy to fall into cliché (at least for me) in one of those I-just-fell-in-love poems.

On the other hand, long-term relationships of any type develop complexity as time passes. That complexity creates a depth and richness that can defy cliché, even when writing of a romantic love relationship.

The Academy of American Poets website has an entire section devoted to poems about marriage and partnership, containing dozens of fine poems. Not all of them are happily-ever-after, but as I’ve heard, marriage is not for the faint of heart.

My second husband and I celebrated our tenth anniversary of marriage this year. I am his fourth wife, so between the two of us, we have a good bit of experience! One of the things I love best about him is that he never tries to censor me — a good habit for someone in a marriage or partnership with a writer.

The poem below was originally published in 2017 in Passager, a journal founded in 1990 in Baltimore, Maryland. Passager only publishes work by writers who are at least 50 years old. They put out beautiful issues, and one of the best things for me about turning fifty was that I could finally submit poems to them.

Marriage Bed

Where sleep renders us equally
introspective and inert, equally

irrational and helpless, unaware
of resentments, or mice rustling,

or branches scraping,
or even of the other’s sleeplessness —

each, in wakeful turn, alone with wakefulness
and envy, astonished at the other’s insensibility.

What luck settles the sleepless partner at last?

The knees unbend as if the body has been lifted up
from face-down prayer. The ligaments extend,

the spine lengthens and the body surrenders
to the heft of the quilts,

to the warmth of the other,
to the mesh of breath,

heft and warmth and mesh tied together
in a poultice, drawing restlessness

from that knot between the shoulder blades.
May we meet in sleep again. Helpless. Disburdened.