we are learning to make fire

This is a punch-in-the-stomach poem about marriage and is maybe not exactly in keeping with the extremely nice vacation weekend I have run away to the woods to have with my wonderful wife. But also I really love this poem and have wanted to post it all month, so. To me this is still a love poem, in its way.

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

—Margaret Atwood, "Habitation" and in this case from Selected Poems 1965-1975 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987), but I definitely got it from Instagram and thus do not have exact original publication info. Margaret Atwood, man.