Love Among The Wrinkles

By Margie Keane

 

Tears irrigate wrinkles
In Mama’s face, trickling
Down, splopping off her chin. “I’m old,”
She says, “I looked in the mirror
And it shows an old crone, but I feel so young.
Where has my life gone? How can I be loved?

With my grandchildren I feel loved.
They make me forget my wrinkles
Because they treat me like I’m young and
their vitality trickles through my veins
but that rotten mirror!
Why does it show me so old?

How can anyone love this old
Wrinkled face? I can’t even love
It. When I look in the mirror
I see crepey skin, moles, wrinkles.
Outside my youth seems to have trickled
Away yet inside I still feel young.

I look at my mother and tell her to me she is still young,
That to me, she’ll never seem old.
She talks of my father whose life trickled
away in cancer cells. She said “At seventy he still wanted to make love
But by the time he shook out the wrinkles
He forgot what It was he wanted.”

She says I’m a mirror of him.
I tell her life itself is a mirror,
and her eyes reflect the young
person lurking behind her wrinkles,
that they are the chronicles of her life, not of old age,
I see creases from laughter, marks of love

I leave her then,
and I feel a dampness trickling into ditches
beginning in my face, trickles
trapped in tiny creases. I look in my mirror.
My husband is standing behind me, looking at me with love,
and I cry. Not for my mother, no longer young
but for the two of us. We’re growing old.
Laugh lines? Worry lines? They’re wrinkles!

I say to him “Let’s not let our lives trickle away. We’ll
be young always. We’ll shroud the mirrors showing
us old and we’ll make love among the wrinkles.

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