Love, After

[RiverNotch]

Love, After (edit 1, the Pen)

Thirty years of clutching
the wheel through blizzards
and black ice skids.

Twenty years of habitual
designated driving,
hand over glass.

Ten years now of you
offering up the passenger seat,
I watch the hills roll.

The new version is sharper than the earlier one. I like how each line of the revised stanza subverts the one before it. "Ten years now of you" is almost a sort of cliche, until "offering up the passenger seat" shifts the attention from the person to a particular action; then "I watch the hills roll" simply concludes the sentence, rather than introduces a separate image as with the third lines of the previous stanzas. Overall, it's concise, without being one-dimensional: a lovely bit of work.