after Jan Gossaert’s Portrait of an Old Couple (ca. 1525-1530)
So here we are, a few years short of wizened, fit to sit dressed up for a double portrait of a marriage that’s lasted.
My husband has his preoccupations and I’ve acquired my own — our oldest son still learning to inherit the concern, the surviving daughters nursing their children as I nursed mine until my well-used womb turned useless, the stillborn, the four small losses to chilling fevers, most living sons at distances I’ll never travel
and, yes, my husband’s hands, which the painter studies with a discerning skill I wish I had, their grip, steady and purposeful, making my husband the man I love.
No, love is a silly word, as the painter somehow knows. He knows to keep tenderness from softening our faces, knows that, if our marriage started with a giddy coupling of yearning and youthful fancy, it was simply a risky bargain. He wants — and we’ve agreed — the portrait to show that we have earned through years of cares, shared and unshared, our durable content.
Jack Kristiansen’s poems have appeared in such places as FIELD, The Literary Review, Stone’s Throw Magazine, Main Street Rag and The Ekphrastic Review.
