Bibliofreakblog

FreeVerse: After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Um, this is coming a day late this week.  Oh well.

When I was in college I had a professor who said that he’d actually met Galway Kinnell’s son, and asked him how he felt about this poem.  The son said that he was totally cool with it, because “how many people have been immortalized in poems?”

“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” by Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himslef awake
and make for it on the run–as now we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears–in his baseball pajamas, it happens
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players–
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startingly muscled  body–
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.