Time travelers
We met, finally, in our forties
slightly frayed,
with Complications
so knotted we weren’t looking for Love
not that kind anyway
just some fucking to forget
that we wanted everything, everything in a partner
and weren’t going to find it.
One night in the kitchen, hand up my dress, you said,
“I feel like we’re both fifteen”,
and it was true
two teenagers laughing like crazy between the kisses
dodging sprinklers
and talking, talking, talking till dawn.
It’s never been like this before
I mean
I want
every
day
of my life with you
and not just our future
I want to be together every day of our pasts
My soul stretching out in your sunbeam.
Green praying mantis on the wall
and we’re five years old,
holding out a hand for it to climb,
breathless with the beauty of its motion
and also wondering if it will pinch.
Fixing the bunk bed
and we’re thirty-four,
romantic walks to the hardware store for a screw,
laughter when we finish with the same thought.
Your scent beside me in the bay window
as we talk about cities we’ve loved,
hands stroking skin,
bodies arching under the streetlight.
We’re twenty-two,
never tasted defeat,
full of plans and ideas and love.
Living forward and backward at once
each new day unwrapped together
a new surprise.
Fingertips to fingertips,
age eight,
twenty-seven,
and now thirty-four again,
amorous but so tired you fall asleep,
fingers in my cunt.
Now in our forties we’ve tasted defeat
known despair and loneliness and regret and loss
cradling every younger age safe through that dark tunnel
and now
now that we’re through
we let them loose
to roughhouse
and caress
and dream,
playing infinite games.
And at every age the stars.
© Copyright 2020 Autumn Looijen
