I feel the stiffness and creaking of
my joints
and
remember that my hair is gray
because
blight has swept across a shock of wheat.
I
recall many things I can only recall in fits and spurts.
But
then I behold beauty with long black hair
longer
than white legs smooth as ivory,
blue eyes in which I could drown,
lips
as cliched as cherries but just as sweet.
It
is outrageous, unfair, altogether wrong
that
Grecian beauty painted so finely
with
the colors of a pagan springtime fair
is
beyond the reach of a straw skeleton
carrying
decades of burden and wrinkled care.
Oh,
to be a wizard and spin myself back in time
to drink the juice of a forbidden summer love,
backwards
leapfrogging all of my mistakes
so
that I again may taste my first sip of wine.
I
then remember the sure reality—
the
pun most surely intended—
in
which I am always as strong and supple
as
the sapling that does not bend,
a
cavalier who pulls close the slender waist
for
a consummate kiss that never ends.
Such
fantasies for me are as solid
as
mountains etched on sky.
Who
is left to tell me that I cannot live
for
the dreamy night rather than the day?
Who
commands my brain to order itself
in
this or that or some other way?
I
jog along, stop, jump, click my heels,
and
exactly when that happens
is
not for you to know or me to say.
Years
fall away so easily when biting into a peach.
~William Hammett
Site Map
No comments:
Post a Comment