When Will it Be Over?

Will it be over when I roll onto my back, panting
and weak, melting with sweat?
Will it end when you lift your damp hair from
my shoulder and float over the carpet with
the barely audible pats of your bare feet onto
the tile of the bathroom floor?
When you return, lifting the covers,
folding your legs in and down again,
twining them with mine, turning, making
my lips come to yours, kissing me without
opening, touching the hair on the back of my
head as I close my eyes and stroke your
cheek with my thumb, and we turn, parting
slightly, becoming still enough to sleep —
will that be the last page of this story?

When will it be over? Tomorrow morning,
as we scuttle through rooms, readying children,
creating ourselves, obeying the world’s
clock, instead of our bodies, is that when?
Will it be finished as I drive to work under
a gray sky, when I feel the lonely swelling
in my lap, as I remember this lovemaking?
When I am distracted at work, and my
companions tell dirty jokes, will I forget
to be in love with you? Will you lose me
in the accounting, somewhere between seven
and two and five?

Later — tomorrow perhaps — when I am
no longer naked, no longer over you, no longer
moving within you; later, when once again I can
think, when you are reading and the children are
playing quietly and I am writing this poem — will that,
finally, be the conclusion to this lovemaking?
When you are no longer mewling with pleasure?
Or will I already have written this poem, and you
already have put the children to bed, and in love
beyond ceasing, we will find ourselves here and now,
doing this, waiting for it to never be over?