Not Even for Cleopatra

Once youth has fled the skin, the beauty will

Be like the dryness and the sand of dunes.

The breasts will sag like rotting fruit and spill

Towards death, or worse, like twelve-tone music tunes

Abandoned by the likes of Mendelssohn.

The wrinkled chest will not be able to

Recall the days (and nights!) of firmness.  None

Of previous hard lovers will renew

Their long-lost lust and certainly not love

Those curves except in desiccated thoughts,

Not quite as memory, like a long-lost glove

That never fitted round arthritic knots.

  No Johnny Appleseed will come with spills

    Of promises to turn to pink spring hills.

~ Phillip Whidden