Coming to Terms with Myself

She says she prefers it from behind where she can’t see me
where I am headless, chestless—hands and thighs and groin and not
a great bulk bearing down, the heft of accumulated years,
of familiar disappointments. I understand that,
especially since she doesn’t put it quite that way,
that harsh or truthful. I am not the man I was, light
and agile, playful, spider of desire that skimmed
across her delicate architecture and spun out pleasure.
I am so much more now (that’s playful!): husband, gardener,
accountant, repository of shared memories,
both good and bad, accretion of thirty-five years
of marriage. I, too, sometimes want to be someone else—
an Olympic swimmer, maybe, all that sleek muscle,
that lean and hairless wonder, that youth unspotted
and wartless, those underwater undulations.
I get it. I say—in my private mind—go ahead
and close your eyes, imagine what you want, what you need,
what in this most intimate moment pleases you most.
While I may not be him or it, I am pretty sure
I am that old Cal sweatshirt she loves though it is tired
and frayed at neck and cuffs, its golden letters cracked
by decades of wash and wear, its Berkeley blue faded
and stained. It is stretched to perfect around-the-house fit.
If she can live with that old rag, then so can I.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English and now tries writing what he formerly taught students to read and enjoy. He has a handful of poems appearing in Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and other literary magazines.