February 2019
Note: Several years ago I noticed that there aren’t a whole lot of love poems out there about octogenarians—except for the ones where the young poet chokes up at the sight of Grandma and Grandpa holding hands as they shuffle across the street. Awww. Totally adorbs, right? Well, to me this sort of stereotyping smacks of hard-core agism. So I took it upon myself at that time to write a poem about eighty-somethings in which reality plays a role.
The Lovers at Eighty
Fluted light from the window finds her
sleepless in the double bed, her eyes
measuring the chevron angle his knees make
under the coverlet. She is trying to recall
the last time they made love. It must have been
in shadows like these, the morning his hands
took their final tour along her shoulders and down
over the pearls of her vertebrae
to the cool dunes of her hips, his fingers
executing solemn little figures
of farewell. Strange—it’s not so much
the long engagement as the disengagement
of their bodies that fills the hollow
curve of memory behind her eyes--
how the moist, lovestrung delicacy
with which they let each other go
had made a sound like taffeta
while decades flowed across them like a veil.
© 2019 Marilyn L. Taylor
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