Wild Love – October 2021

From Wild Love, 1996, by Nancy Wood (unpublished)

 

When people look at us they see

an ordinary couple edging past their prime,

not beautiful, but slack with having hoarded time.

You with your look of contentment and me

with the eyes of  a woman permanently in love

are construed as complacency by most. We are called

respectable, dependable, unremarkable. And so we live

beneath a cloak of mild deception, laughing to ourselves.

 

No one knows that behind closed doors

you and I become young again through the magic

of desire and in our bed we make wild love

until we greet the sun. Wild love is a secret love,

the kind that ordinary couples must preserve

to keep the outside world from coming in.