Closing the Distance

"In sickness and in health..."

These hands once touched for the first time. Young, smooth, strong, erotic.

In the beginning a held hand drives the eros of the future.

But the hands of a marriage? What poet can tell the beatitude of a touch? What warrior can endure the ruin of a violent or indifferent hand?

I have seen this: Toward the end a held hand is the seal of endurance, the wisdom of eros abandoned because it had done its hard work, a hand extended in nothing more or less than a gritty agape, still sacrificing but now at peace with the asceticism of love.