Before and after the kiss, I stood
in our shadowed hall encircled
by the familiar—cracked walls, half-
finished molding, a malfunctioned
thermostat, piled clothes, and scattered
toys. One son shrieking some indecipherable
code as he climbs my leg, the other dedicating
his mercurial limbs to the freeing
of a work-laden briefcase. Our eyes
don't meet. I don't ask
you about your day, for fear
that I already know. We've done this
before, a thousand times.

But the kiss reminds
me that all of this is strange—a foreign
future witnessed like a movie unfolding
from a past when a kiss defined
us. Our lips know the routine—brush gently, oscillate
coyly, then press. But this moment, this brisk osculation,
this is the us I recognize and come home
to, not a new kiss, but an old kiss, singular
and held indefinitely, strung
like Christmas lights across our years.

But which kiss is it? Am I returning
to our first kiss, huddled awkwardly
on your kitchen linoleum? Perhaps
a kiss upon the sand of a forgotten
Delaware beach as I fumble for a ring
in my coat pocket? A cold midnight
embrace along an old country road outside
my parents house, or an impromptu
passion amongst stacks of moving boxes resting
unopened in a basement for months after
our honeymoon?

Am I remembering a kiss at all? Or instead
a conversation aboard an amusement park gondola, hung
out alone over a hundred people? Perhaps a three-
hour car ride home from two Shakespearean plays
and a Celtic dance lesson, on the day we met? A breakfast
discussion forever interrupted by contractions
on the morn of our first child? Or a Jenga
game played for hours on blanketed
grass, daring each other to discover
our two pasts, to imagine our one future?

The recollection consumes and escapes me,
and I know only that all of this, save
the kiss, was not part of that once
imagined future. These are the details we left
to play out, owing not to a lack
of forethought, but a surrender
to the kiss. So that, as our lips part, I'm still
not sure what I'm doing here, only that I am
suddenly aware of the whispering
of a thousand directions in our eyes
as they awaken to scattered toys and half-finished
home repairs, slowly comprehending
the umbral hall in which we pause
before and after the kiss.