Middle Aged Lovers, Ii

You open to me a little, then grow afraid and close again, a small boy fearing to be hurt, a toe stubbed in the dark, a finger cut on paper. I think I am free of fears, enraptured, abandoned to the call of the Bacchae, my own siren, tied to my own mast, both Circe and her swine. But I too am afraid: I know where life leads. The impulse to join, to confess all, is followed by the impulse to renounce, and love-- imperishable love-- must die, in order to be reborn. We come to each other tentatively, veterans of other wars, divorce warrants in our hands which we would beat into blossoms. But blossoms will not withstand our beatings. We come to each other with hope in our hands-- the very thing Pandora kept in her casket when all the ills and woes of the world escaped.