GROWING OLD
No longer do I crave mariscos at Las Palmitas
with a belly full of Andalusian wine, dancing
the cachuca beneath a moonlit sky blanketed
with luminous stars shining through a latticed
concord grape arbor in the restaurant’s
gardenia- filled garden.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday blur, merging
into ordinary days, no longer waiting to see
what’s playing at the Rialto on Saturday night.
Home is now so sweet, no more yackking,
popcorn smelling audience yahoos gumming up
movie seats, just my honey and I cozy in bed,
wide eyed before a flat plasma HDTV screen
inundated with the embrace of surround sound
and closed captions when one of us wants to snooze.
Every day a vacation day, breakfast in bed, scrounging
sunny-side-up or eggs-Benedict, lounging around
sun poured honey-coated beams of translucent light,
a scene as sublime as Vermeer’s captured stillness.
I massage back neck, ears and ten little toes,
she pin points meridian metatarsal pathways
on the soles of my feet, triggering, and jiggering
spasms of muscles and tendons in my Achilles heel.
No more costume parties with Dracula biting her neck while
she belly danced as Queen of Sheba or when we all wore vintage
clothes, cranked up a wind up victrola, vamping to:
“I’ll be down to get you in a taxi honey…”or
“Take good care of yourself, you belong to me.”
On New Years eve in 1967 we sat stock still, stunned by Sgt. Pepper’s
strange new contours, dreaming of Lucy’s rocking horse people
eating marshmallow pies, sampled the Liquid Theatre in the city,
and as the sun rose over the Hudson, monitored the parade
of transgressive burghers from Queens leaving Plato’s Retreat,
tempted but too shy to sample the boundaryless pleasures
in the sticky basement of the Ansonia hotel.
Those were the days when Acapulco-Gold inspired
improvised dance, neighbors falling in love with neighbors
as divorce raged like wildfire up and down the block.
Sole survivors reminisce about the casualties of love gone astray.
Milton P. Ehrlich 199 Christie St. Leonia, N.J. 07605