Old Man

by C. K. Williams

Special. Big tits.

Says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand.

But forget her breasts.

A lush, fresh-lipped blond, skin glowing gold, sprawls there, resplendent.

60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than harlots, can still stir me.

Maybe a coming of age in the American sensual darkness,

never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina,

has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye.

Always that erotic murmur,

I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire.

God knows though, there are worse twists your obsessions can take.

Last year in Israel, a young ultra-orthodox Rabbi guiding some teenage girls through the Shrine of the Shoah

forbade them to look in one room. Because there were images in it he said were licentious.

The display was a photo. Men and women stripped naked,

some trying to cover their genitals, others too frightened to bother,

lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch.

The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze.

What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them.

Even that though. Another confession:

Once in a book on pre-war Poland,

a studio portrait, an absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes.

I kept finding myself at her page.

That she died in the camps made her -- I didn't dare wonder why --

more present, more precious.

Died in the camps, that too people -- or Jews anyway -- kept from their children back then.

But it was like sex, you didn't have to be told.

Sex and death, how close they can seem.

So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me, sometimes I think I confound them.

My wife's loveliness almost consumes me.

My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds.

When we make love, her holding me everywhere all around me, I'm there and not there.

My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions,

I live my life over, as though I were drowning.

Then I am drowning, in despair at having to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful.

Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered, or enslaved.

And not having to know history's next mad rage or regression, it might be a relief.

No. Again, no. I don't mean that for a moment.

What I mean is the world holds me so tightly -- the good and the bad --

my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit Venus

with her sham heat, and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves me

my breath catches. Vamp. Siren. Seductress.

How much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows.

How she incarnates our desperate human need for regard,

our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty, to be cherished by glances,

if by no more, of something like love,

or love.