Love, Age 50
by Tom Baker

I do not love your body
anymore than I love mine
now that both are
shadowed in the children,
now that your body
shapes my sleep
and worries me awake.

Your body was once my god;
brutal and secret, just beyond
reach but easily tricked,
tempting crusades in me,
moving me to proclamations
of ownership. It was that body
I married my youth to
and lost the zealot in;
that body finally small and simple,
randomly scarred and birth marked,
breathlessly plain, plainly desired.

I love your name, now,
a name fitted into mine
and still strange to the children:
it is a word apart----
a clear bell on a cold morning,
a redbird in a clean sky,
new grass.

© Copyright Tom Baker 2019- 2008