Living Together

My parents worked out a way of living together
(if you could call it that).
Dad worked at a company that furnished
bullet proof plastic to banks.
So the whole house was divided - each room divided
by bullet-proof glass.
There were slide-open drawers with pneumatic tubes
for passing things back and forth.
And long rubber gloves built into the glass
you could touch things on the other side.
Like to pass the carrots at the dinner table.
He even worked out a way that mom
could light his cigarette for him,
using mechanical arms that were controlled by
a set of levers and handles on her side of the room.
And Dad would operate a pair of oars to make
a pair of wooden hands with velvet gloves
stroke my mother's hair.
They slept in hammocks
connected to each other by ropes and pulleys
so that if one person turned over, it would stir the other.

There was one room with an automatic sliding door between the sides
It was kind of the opposite of those ones at Safeway:
if you came near it -- or even made any noise -- it would slide shut.
Otherwise it was always open.
Sometimes they would sit in that room, on their opposite sides,
and just stare at each other through the open door.