Patricia Smith

SEX AT 82


   For Bruce

You say there won’t be any, but you’re wrong.
Insisting you’ll be dead by then,
you’ve plotted quite a flamboyant adieu,
beginning with your sweetly oiled body balanced on a pyre
ringed with orange. All your repentant ex-wives
and wailing former lovers leap into the flames,
distraught at the thought of a world sans you,
while what’s left of the Rolling Stones,
in their last live performance ever,
cackle “Sympathy for the Devil.”
You have made this extravagance a condition of your will.
I love you. Though.
Don’t be in such a hurry to go.
We’ve got overloads of languid,
time to grow aged in each other’s arms
and coax stubborn bodies into position.
In days to come, we will brace gut against gut,
having a grand ol’ time figuring out what goes where,
so surprised once it goes there
that we have to nap.
We will be wheeze and exclaim, too drooped
and crinkled for anyone but us to behold.
Traversing our lumped landscapes again and again,
we’ll marvel at new valleys, places for heat to hide.
My shoulders and breasts, fallen south by many inches,
will strain toward perk under your fumbling fingers.
I’ll search behind your zipper with uncanny patience,
thankful that it’s usually already open.
Seduction will be eerily slow, sometimes mistaken
for other things. We will rub and explore for hours,
often falling asleep in the process,
then jolted awake by a poke from one triumphant finger.
You say there won’t be any, but you’re wrong.
As our minds blink toward gone,
it will be the one thing we remember to do.
The milk will sour, medicine bottles will go unopened,
garbage will pile up. The dog, undernourished and ignored,
will pack up and head for a more nurturing door.
But then our rheumy eyes will meet—that way—
and we’ll begin a purposeful limp toward one another,
our batteried hearts pumping with pluck and resolve,
blessed with exactly enough uninterrupted future
to get it on just one more time.

Patricia Smith is a 2008 National Book Award finalist for "Blood Dazzler," which chronicles the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Her other books include "Teahouse of the Almighty," a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; "Close to Death"; "Big Towns, Big Talk" and "Life According to Motown". She also authored the ground-breaking history "Africans in America" and the award-winning children's book "Janna and the Kings". Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals, and has been performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam's Poetry International, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history. She teaches in Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.