When is the sentence? When the rule?
Is love only for the young? Passion denied after certain decade?
Does lying in the afternoon, tangled in our creased movement, somehow cease at certain juncture?
Removed and lost, replaced by sensible conversation and larger lunches?
No sag permitted? Desire given a codeword only known to the young?
Do ladies of a certain age still splinter into starlight and bursting, hold the rapture like a songbird?
I have seen wrinkled, grey women with pendulous breasts and spongy thighs
Take the best of a young man’s drawn in breath
With just one measured glance and turn of disobedient foot
Their steel hair aflame, the catapult of their sex burning on their jaunty lips curled in conquest
Surely there is no air left in the room
Surely he cares nothing of their scars and marks of life when standing over him
She is all woman
Full and robust like the wine he dares not serve for saving
She has no need of games or manifest
Hers is not a youthful, flighty, thinning regard
He will not love her for the firmness of her bosom nor quietly praise her convulsing hips
Instead, together they will turn ripe fruit to drink
And laughing, pour the marrow of meaning one from the other, sharing mouthfuls
A united confidence (we will both die one day)
A mutual understanding (but oh what fun we shall have till then!)
I see them
No longer shackled to status quo nor bound to social convention
Free as their clothes billow in the fulment of a second era
The one Jung promised held insight and yes
Abundance of desire, for we have laid down our vanity and gathered our applause
Lost in his ardent kiss and the meeting of them, drawn as one
Holding up the world and each other with humor and plucked string
Her smile reminds him of being twenty and then, not at all
Glad for his years and the sensation of her over him like a night time rose
Her perfume is from every corner, her touch a slow syrup poured in time to symphony
He is captivated by the folds her mouth makes
Eating pasta by firelight, cross-legged in mirth
She is at once the girl and the crone but most of all she is woman
Enfolding him inside herself like a conch with many windings
Her life can be told from the lines on her neck
There is the stillborn, there the hungry child pulling at her sore nipple, there the stretch of life roaming her stomach in silver marks
She smells like damsons picked late in the season
A little wild
He can lay himself down next to her and tell her his fears and she will listen
As she has walked this long on the same well worn road
Sometimes dancing, sometimes searching, always witness
He can dream whilst he rides inside of her without rebuke
She will submerge them both in her intuition till moon goes beneath cloud, silvery and wrapped in insight
When she cries out, he will bend to her need with the lesson of years and instrument
Not a young man with muscled body and formless brain
But a partner able to pleasure her with the depth he has finally sewn
Her eyes may wake red and tired but her laugh is deep and echoes throughout his day like ticker tape
Reminding him he has surely found at long last, a mate
And she, a friend, in this abyss of living, a hand
To clasp and be tugged back to life time and again
For theirs is more alive now than fifty years since
Running, slow and surely, after the dying brand of fire
Eclipsing the sunset with its incandescent glow
Her face enfused with light and he
Crying without knowing why, whispers in jagged pieces
His symphony of love
Then, now, eternal and beyond.
“If I could give my younger self any advice it would be to say fuck off more often.” Helen Mirren.
TheFeatheredSleep 