and then we all held hands and jumped into the sky

Not sentiment but those hands bring me to four in the afternoon on one more beautiful cool clear September saturday. I sit stock-still to Ani's Self-Evident sway, let salt water fall into the tequila; we shake our heads -- and pour.

The sun just came out of its last cloud. It's been a long day. This morning:

Morning has broken like the first morning
God, it's beautiful

Up after the sun but before it broke through the treeline, windows open to blue sky
the grass feels like the ocean, so cold, the water and bare toes
good morning!
Good morning.
For the next hour I will be in the garden, pinning and pulling and fussing over plants
(too happy blooming to notice);
time to think about autumn and the things that come next.

Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning

The Hungry Widow

Sex ceases to be spontaneous
in this Age of Aids
but there are compensations
and time to prepare
and you need it if you've
been sharing your bedroom
with an incontinent cat as I have
and you're almost sixty-five
and don't lubricate as you once did
and the handsome-hunk housepainter
who's fifty at the most
and the object of masturbatory
fantasies all spring
drops in to tell me
he'd seen my breasts one morning
when my pegnoir gaped and he wants me
but his brother's in the car
so he'd like to make love to me Saturday.
I would like that too I say.
After a few tentative kisses and groping
that don't live up to my fantasies
he goes away and I start preparing.

I went to the pet store and bought
a deodorizer for cat urine
and shampooed my rug.

I went to a pharmacy where I'm not known
and asked in a frosty voice
for a recommended lubricant named Astral-glide.
"Astro-glide," corrected the gentle giant
who held out the two available sizes.
I pretended to read the labels
and took the large economy size
although a drop would do.

I carried tons of paper out of my bedroom
and stacked them on the guestroom bed
re-lined my bedroom drapes
with a paperclip-hung, king-size sheet
that would shed a kindlier light upon the scene.

On Friday morning I went to the market
bought flowers, canteloupe, Persian melon
raspberries strawberries and peaches;
In case he wanted Belgian waffles
I added pecans, whipped cream
sweet butter and lingonberry jam.
I went to the best Swiss bakery bakery and bought
fresh croissants and a coffee cake called Paradise.

Friday afternoon I went to a beauty salon
and had a facial, a manicure and a pedicure
a shampoo and a set designed to hold up in bed.

Humming Pretty Woman all the way to get up nerve
I went into another pharmacy where I was unknown
to ask the pharmacist for an assortment
of his best condoms.
A stuffy pedant, he said there was no such thing.
He said it all depended-
did l want to prevent pregnancy or disease?
I told him I thought at my age
we could focus on the latter
so I bought two packages laden with spermicide
just in case my painter forgot.

Last of all I set up a patio chair on my balcony
convenient for a post-coital cigarette
and went to bed early to be ready for morning-
the scent of night blooming stock in my nostrils-
my puzzled cat curled at my feet.

-- Anne Marple

Casualty

Fear arrived at my door
with the evening paper
Headlines of winter and war
It will be a long time to peace
And the green rains.

- Virginia Adair, age 90

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sharon Olds