As Mourning Doves Persist

My husband leaves each weekday morning at seven. I hear the door to the laundry room open and close. Then sense a gremlin draft  from the adjacent vacated garage. The house goes quiet    for nearly nine hours. He rarely leaves a dirty dish in the sink though  lately  he hasn’t made up the queen-size bed entirely. One corner of  the sheets  pulled back like a welcoming tent flap. Returning, he stacks his most recent hardback library acquisitions  on the blonde end table next to his burgundy wingback chair,  and retrieves the same blue bowl nightly for a dinner salad   which he eats alone. Hungry earlier than I still typing. He walks the hallway with a minor tilt and two clenched fists as if  balanced oars.    This, a recently acquired mannerism. Together we are kitchen dwellers. Gritty lemon pepper granules and orange juice sans pulp. Eggs on the weekend. Subtitles on the television in a room where all that’s missing are TV trays.    My own paperback reads are in the bedroom on the beds

                         A car stops and the door opens                                               -   Linda Gregg, Bamboo and A Bird   A car stops and the door opens and sound  escapes. Splash that was not there before.  Into the air, jazzy brush on drum. Lullaby with rouged plum sky.  Snippet of guitar strum, winsome sonata.  Sound propels me to see all the cars parked  under the summer night’s street lights.  Cars with bodies inside sucking smoke and  reaching for one another.  From my vehicle determined closure  as my mother zips her weighty beige  purse shut. Dangling from her left hand.  A single tube of lipstick having fallen  onto the sidewalk alongside us. Its descriptive clink like dropping  a silver dollar into Sunday’s offering plate.  Or the joviality of my handsome  younger father on a Saturday night  tossing dice. Blowing on them first  over splayed game board, sounding  ha-cha .  Or is it simply the metallic  creak of the VW’s dented passenger  door releasing from th