Ironing and Smoking

My fingers don’t have the elegant length
of yours, with the pinkie bent in the middle
at rest, but still in the thousand wrinkles
early in my hands
your thin skin shines

as did burns from the iron on the heel
of your hand, the wrist, the flesh of the forearm,
distracted as you were by television
squinting through cigarette smoke
to see Don Ameche romancing on Channel 4

returning you for those few hours
to movie theaters where Myrna Loy
stood in for you with Clark Gable.
(You filled a shoebox with your pencil portraits of him.)

No wonder you married him after three weeks.
Movie-star handsome, Clark Gable by day
with a dash of Durante for humor
but Lon Chaney at night

I watched you simmer
at the ironing board
turning your wedding band ‘round and ‘round
turning the smoke carefully over
silently in your mouth before you exhaled.