7 from Geo-Bestiary
O that girl, only young men
dare to look at her directly
while I manage the most side-long of glances:
olive-skinned with a Modigliani throat,
lustrous obsidian hair, the narrowest
of waists and high french bottom, ample
******* she tries to hide in a loose blouse.
Though Latino her profile is from a Babylonian
frieze and when she walks with her small white dog
with brown spots she fairly floats along,
looking neither left nor right, meeting no one's
glance as if beauty was a curse. In the grocery
store when I drew close her scent was jacaranda,
the tropical flower that makes no excuses.
The geezer's heart swells stupidly to the dampish
promise. I walk too often in the cold shadow
of the mountain wall up in the arroyo behind the house.
Empty pages are dry ice, numbing the hands and heart.
If I weep I do so in the shower so that no one,
not even I can tell. To see her is to feel
time's cold machete against my grizzled neck,
puzzled that again beauty has found her home in threat.
Older man/younger woman (or even vice versa), in our culture we don't know what to make of this, so we laugh and mumble jokes about perverts, etc. But what is love and how can you be sure it will arrive in a matched set?
