Terri Brown-Davidson – Ⅳ

Age Song 

 

 

 

 

My husband’s eyes, luminously blue, flicker and cool

in a fast wedge of shadow that, darkening his face,

elongates it, reduces it to bone and bristle, to flashes

of glare parenthesizing his mouth.

I dismantle him in his own dissective

games that he cherishes, craves,

playing with all and sundry.

I attend the sloughs of our gray skin

cells littering fresh sheets,

transmogrifying in white washes of light

into a pooled, filthy radiance

I can’t swallow or taste. In early-morning light,

my husband’s eyes are nothing like the sky.

Blue, not azure,

not periwinkle, not cerulean,

they gaze red-lidded

with the ruined-dun aspect

I associate with the sad or craven

though we’re neither decrepit nor Scottish,

my soul mate and I,

simply aging predictably in the loose flesh bags

we once called our bodies

Eating oranges for breakast, the yellowish dripping juice

staining our fingers, we fumble, suddenly, for napkins,

blot our chins, lick our lips, glance at the two shining

glasses topped off with fresh milk, wax poetic

then, laughing prophetically, grasp the small

slick scraps of orange littering our table,

test them quickly with bites and miniscule nibbles,

savor them with lips and teeth and tongue

as we do–when we can–

the quick, incandescent moments that darken as they pass.