Who shall love?

If you are not a beautiful creature

Is there love for you?

When the world appears bewitched by youth and eternal moment’s boiled to infuse

Who shall love?

Who shall love?

The imperfect and technically “past it”

When beautiful felt like;

The sound of heals clicking on marble

Then slippers

Then bare feet

Then silence

No attention for a certain shape, age, gaze

Consolation crows, grow your mind

Crack jokes

Have a sense of humor

Laugh at yourself.

Long before, boys fell in love with me first;

Because of an hourglass

A firmness

A tightness

A willingness

The measure of hips

And then later, aserbic wit

I say ignore the rules

Climb trees at sixty, chomping on cigar

Wear polkadots, rolling dice on roof tops

Make love in bramble hedges and countertops

We talk of politics and deep sea diving, the need for conscience, passion and chocolate biscuits

You didn’t need a perfect pair of legs or a tiny waist

Eventually you wanted a woman of four seasons

Who couldn’t hold her alcohol anymore and streaked across the lawn

A girl of seventy and four, mayflies buzzing in our ears

Who still beat you at arm wrestling and sang like an angel with grey hair

Opening her robe to your eager devour

For once upon, you were a youthful coward, chasing empty smiles

And now you lay in a woman’s arms marveling at her lines

The black and blue, and those she fought hard for, birthing children

Crossing her face like stars

More beautiful for their dance

On skin long past its prime and so fine

For a constellation is music over time

Then and only then, love breathes eternal

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The preserve of her emotions

Get up.

When you were ten, your body was a springboard

You bent in the wind, dashing forward.

Get up.

When did you start to believe otherwise?

With the coming of stiff mornings and anxiety in your belly?

As life crept nearer to unknown trials?

When did you give up believing?

You could again, hold the Fates cupped in your hand

And blow to scatter, seed to four corners.

Get up.

The white sheet, covers a multitude of unsaid

An imprint of the living, breathing, fear of mankind.

She appears to be a well behaved woman, with hair needing to be trimmed

But like a cake of many layers, the face fit for public consumption, is just wet paint.

If it was acceptable, she’d grab the quiet man, stooping to take her vitals

And craw in his ear, the gravy of her distress.

What would she say? That has not been said before? Who would care? In an ever-ready world powered by rhetoric?

When she was eighteen, she could command attention just by crossing her legs or flashing her eyes

But what a dismal game that felt, a fraud of poker and thighs.

They only paid her heed due to the bewitchment of youth and some promise it told their nether regions.

So often she’d mistaken lust and hunger for love and care

But they were no more than empty vessels, wishing to dock briefly in her harbor.

Her game, if it was one … of fishing for favor, a warm body, a pretend consolation

Left her desolate, like an addict without pipe

All her fancy, dried up and rotten in the artifice of it all.

And then she’d tripped over that invisible and superficial line

From youth, to something men did not wish to define and women morned.

She however, felt relief.

Not to be the party planner, proving her game was fitting in

It was gentler to command less and need no filling or straight flush

Though they say a woman’s worth, must be found in herself

For her sell-by-date leaves her invisible to the world.

And that was true. She did no longer

Turn heads or find men leant in, too close

Instead she was a ghost, haunting the specter of herself

Unsure why she claimed purchase on earth anymore.

It was as if the mic had been turned off

And everyone left the room

For the audition of younger models next door.

She was not a mother and could not connect

With married women who worried their husbands would stray, with downy cheeked baby sitter.

Nor was she eager to fill her face with plastic, just to feel a little of what she’d lost

(Why was it a loss?)

There seemed no path cut out for castaways of normal

No clear direction to take, on the other side of age.

Men … they remained mostly unchanged

Still harboring the illusions of youth, with rapidly balding heads and expanding guts

She felt so much … but who now wanted to hear her words?

Where was an audience for silver haired creatures of Artemis?

If she’d been an owl, she’d have screeched at night

And people would have woken and said; Goodness, that sounds like murder!

Such was her need to share

The preserve of her emotion.

So get up.

Though it has been long since you hopped on one foot

Or worn brightly colored hats, just because you could

And not, for the fondle of admirations dusty nod

But the sheer delight of being at last

A woman of substance.

Being twenty

Thinking back

being twenty wasn’t as shiny

as bronze coin swallowed by carp

when

I went to eat Chinese and made a wish

to be young again

 

at twenty

I thought my breasts already hung forlorn

much like the oak grandfather clock

my father lifted from a former nunnery

when the nuns were gone and buried with the rhododendrons

the building disarticulated stood empty

beseeching intruders

awaiting renovation into flats for rich city dwellers

whose coins were gold

my father said

it seems a shame to let these apple and plum trees

be torn up and shredded they are mature and have

earned a right

so by night we dug up their rosewood roots

hefting in my grandfather’s wheel barrow down cobbled street

planted them in the little weedy garden out back

where they endured without their crowns

 

much as I endured being twenty

thinking myself imperfect

because of the pressure

burning like a hot wire in my

fizzing young head

like tight roller skates leave indents

my father said the trees never

bore fruit after moving

because once you’re planted

you grow roots only once

 

maybe that’s like being young

you are a tumbleweed and whilst some

take to being a spirit composed of air

there is something reassuring

like a warm fire or

a steaming bath

when you know it doesn’t really matter

all the fanciful dreams you had intended to wear

the way you sucked your stomach in

when he touched you underneath your dress

that tugged uncomfortably at tight seams

because you wanted to be

as gamine as

Audrey Hepburn

Beyond the quarter hour

The Indigo Girls did not know

who Joan Baez was

a loam cried out

as first frost silenced the land

likening dawn

etched empty branches

she sang with an old voice

much used

like firewood

is best when properly dried

her voice was a voice of a woman

who had walked many years unseen

for after a certain age they say

women become invisible

she decided this was a wonderful way

her wings could remain outstretched

and not hidden as before

when she was sculpted and honed

like a cold statue

men would seek to touch

now her magic felt like a velvet glove

able to touch the mist and curling into a fist

summon spirits to her world

beyond the quarter-hour

no more obliged to purse

for onlooker

Figure eight

It is true

the feel of grit

kissing skin

skinning shins

learning mistakes

through trial

those forbidden sins

made real behind school wall

where youthful fumble with

strange hooks and buttons to release

their wail against the world

they know not yet

the best comes when

all foible and tinsel is left

to keep night awake

whilst we slip into our coats

leaving tracks across the lake

and skating like dreamers too soluble to wake

turn and cut messages out of powdered ice

in our heady retreat from compromise

growing toward our years in eager release

no more push-up bras needed nor

pinching heels except of course when

drowsy with midnight madness we

reenact those anxious days

now unruffled by the sweaty fears of

first vintage

you are able to carry your own

I shall undress in turn

finding your desire wicked ever more

potent in the slowness of our motion

two figures cutting out figure eights

lit by yellow glaze of moon

wringing its hands in humor

for too soon we will be thawed

returning with pinked cheeks

holding hands close the door

on another year of love

made burgundy under covers

where firelight moves us near

to each others gentle warmth