The Silver Arrow

With your fifteen percent chance to survive,
marriage seemed a doomed possibility,
yet melanoma taught us to live
on two tracks with two new velocities:
Track Death—with cancer fantasies, life
without you, without us—and Track Future
—track of speed, of world detritus, of wife.
Wife of gold and dirt. What won’t/will occur.
Husband of the steady beat. Our joke in bed:
we married for security! We rode
The Silver Arrow into probability,
piercing a landscape that rumpled into hills instead
of tarred plains. Fifteen years to love and rove
unbidden, through the forbidden city.

Molly Peacock
The Silver Arrow is from The Second Blush (W.W. Norton and Co., June 2008).