Jim Stuntz
Begin old. Grow young.
Have your wrinkles at the start.
Manifest smooth skin without effort,
as if acquiring a tan.
Discover dimples, but begin old.
Drift out of watching and remembering
as you fall into firsts.
Find when and how nostalgia took the past;
move beyond it and before it.
Stand up suddenly
for the first time. It will be normal.
Grow young.
Leave your large car behind,
break your glasses, miss your nap.
Let your head grow heavy and dark with hair,
feel it without surprise.
Run.
You will not wish you could look back.
Your prodigal teeth return;
they cement as you suck them in.
(Chunks of silver fly from your mouth,
caught by a masked, gloved man.)
As for loved ones, grave-side tears
call the long-lost from the ground.
They walk beside you, found.
One day you introduce yourself and they are gone;
all partings are painless
as you grow young.
Release routine; you will not miss it.
Likewise leave behind companion love,
the worn furnishings of marriage,
slide your quickening way toward lust.
In the mechanics of sex you find
forgotten pleasures turn familiar, turn exotic,
turn to burning gasping brilliance,
turn to groping, bumping:
a machine you suddenly find you cannot operate.
Now lose your virginity for the first time,
again. Grow younger.
Then put on ravaging excitement,
a thousand hopes that feel like home.
Put a hand to your cheek:
feel it soften and swell
the way a fallen peach, thrown by the earth
back into its tree, would reattach,
hydrate, surge to its rejuvenated form.
Now shrink, compact, shift,
sink out of thought
into the waters of this first heaven
that knows your shape alone
and welcomes by surrounding.
Wrap yourself up in loose placental ribbon
and as it grows dark, fear nothing.
You end as you began:
fathomless, wet, ready.
Here.
