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lost and found at tiny thing
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the older
The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful - not my face, plain puritan face, but my body. And I will be fifty, soon, my body getting withery and scrawny, and I like its silvery witheriness, the skin thinning, surface of a lake crimped by wind, ruched wraith, a wrinkle of smoke. Yet when I look down, I can see, sometimes, things that if a young woman saw she would scream, as if at a horror movie, turned to a crone in an instant - if I lean far enough forward, I can see the fine birth skin of my stomach pucker and hang, in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.
And yet I can imagine being eighty, made entirely, on the outside, of that, and making love with the same animal dignity, the tunnel remaining the inside of a raspberry bract. Suddenly, I look young to myself next to that eighty-year-old, I look like her child, my flesh in its loosening drape showing the long angles of these strange bones like cooking-utensil handles in heaven. When I was younger, I looked, to myself, sometimes, like a crude drawing of a female - the breasts, the 1940s flare of the hips - but this greyish, dented being is cosy as a favourite piece of clothing, she is almost lovable, now, to me. Of course, it is his love I am seeing, the working of his thumb over this lucky nickel - five times five years in his pocket. Maybe even if I died, I would not look ugly to him. Sometimes, now, I dance like shirred smoke above a chimney. Sometimes, now, I think I live in the place where the solemn, wild drinking of coming is done, I am not all day coming but all day living in that place where it is done.
Sharon Olds
other forces at work
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil.
dark thoughts
In the light of day, my daughter is a survivor. She's strong, adaptable, and demonstrably resilient. I've provided for her; the will is signed, the custodial arrangements made. And I am pretty sure we won't be needing any of them. But still. et al
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