artwork: ralph murre
The
Lovers at Eighty
by
Marilyn Taylor
Fluted
light from the window finds her
sleepless
in the double bed, her eyes
measuring
the chevron angle his knees make
under
the coverlet. She is trying to recall
the
last time they made love. It must have
been
in
shadows like these, the morning his hands
took
their final tour along her shoulders and down
over
the pearls of her vertebrae
to
the cool dunes of her hips, his fingers
executing
solemn little figures
of
farewell. Strange—it’s not so much
the
long engagement as the disengagement
of
their bodies that fills the hollow
curve
of memory behind her eyes—
how
the moist, lovestrung delicacy
with
which they let each other go
had
made a sound like taffeta
while
decades flowed across them like a veil.
~
first published in the Indiana Review
