Our Sixtieth
A Sixtieth Anniversary: Oedipus Reversed
Attraction through the eye, the limbs, the brain
Portrays the blazing start of this affair;
For years that magnetism did not wane —
Remained the stuff to move a sonneteer.
But time will warp all things alive,
And nearness shows new faults and irritations,
Which each must then upbraid or learn to waive —
This phase increasingly the woman’s mission,
As she endures his ardor turned to books,
His skill at fixing faucets rarely shown,
His back promoting litanies of aches,
His naked pate a stranger to a comb.
At eighty-one he totters, seems confused;
Relies more frequently upon the other;
So relationships must now be re-appraised,
For he’s become a child, his sweetheart his mother.
(2006)
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