she would be eighty, or eighty plus one
her name was Eve, really, she had me
when I was a bucking young mountain man
only weeks back from that “crazy Asian war”
now, a prisoner of the prairies,
its harsh daylight dousing my waking dreams of her,
dispersing them downwind, with other melting memories
I yet hear her English tongue, see her bobbed blonde hair
against her silk pillow, and feel the warmth of her huge fireplace
and her slender fingers on my shoulders
twenty four years younger then
than I sit today, what would she say
if I saw her now? would we lie
with each other, or to each other?
what if she has passed, and all that keeps her
here is the faint fire behind me, the embers
speaking in red whispers, of Eve, of yesterday
and of soft dances in nights
of naked forgetting
yes, there was an Eve from the UK, in 1972, when I was 20 and a day, and she was an ancient 38 or 39