Ageless

"I am old " she said
This body that I never controlled
Now makes me a stranger within it
Now revolts against its own cyclic discipline
Now burns, now freezes, now ceases to flow
Its purpose past
It strips me of what makes me woman.
My skin wrinkles, my bum sags
My belly bulges
Fuzzy-cheeked, my passion dwindles and even my sweat seems
Not my own.
Is the ending of two thousand years the ending of the woman that I was?

I look on. I cannot share this painful mystery.
Yet I know too the mystery that is a woman's body is not the mystery that
is woman.
This changing body is still to me
A thing of beauty
The woman more beautiful still as days continue
To unfold.

That body has proved to me a gate to knowledge.
I know that body in my own body's understanding
That the mind knows not.
What wisdom was there in those lips
That with a kiss rearranged my consciousness,
My body passion-jangled yet sublimely so at peace?

Blemish, freckle and mole
Not flaws, just
Better than perfection -
Irreproducible exciting reminders
That this was a body unique and alone
A pleasure outrageous and matchless
Curling inside my embrace into one endless ball
As we melted into each other.

Numberless sensations
Neck, calf, ankle and instep
Hand-cupped head and orange-blossom hair
Cold leather and hot chocolate
Laughter a bubbling spring of life
Myriad pinpoint shafts of learning
Knowledge my body has
That with a touch she makes me wise, and wiser still,
Wise as the fool who knows yet cannot know
Yet knows enough.

Enough to know as this body changes, and does mine
We meet anew in each embrace.
A shade, a line, a tone
Remakes us, refashions the lovers we were
Within the love we have, the love we are
The love that lives in the laughter
That resounds and reechoes
Around the red hills
And surges yet through narrowing arteries
And stiffening sinews
And fingers not as nimble with a clasp in the dark.

One touch of fingertips
Holds so much
Of history, of past and future
Of who we are and what we will become.
This mystery of woman she continues to unfold
And in doing, unfolds me
Reveals me to myself as the stranger within
And wraps me in her mystery.

Time falls away,
And with it will this pain
And love and wisdom, growing still,
Remain, remain, remain.