Registry of Joint Aging

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 bedside table or
fables balanced like leaning towers in the extra room
where our daughter no longer resides.
 
In the garage are boxes of paid taxes and abandoned costume jewelry.
What once was formerly hidden or lost, is randomly rediscovered 
in this registry. Occasional prayers and erstwhile furrows of worry.
 
We are two jars of peanut butter. One for now and one
for later. Bagels and corn tortillas. Red wine and iced gin. 
One small fork, one oversized spoon in the clatter of other accrual.