We are both middle-aged.
My span is widening,
as are your lanes.
I'm having my greys done;
you are being checked
for metal fatigue.
I wear jeans and t-shirts —
fashionable but modest.
You wear lurid,
yellow windsocks
to complement your grey,
all-weather foundations,
and you cover your street lights
with flowerpot hats
in a manner I can only call brave.
When it rains,
you cloak your figure
with a fine organza veil —
a negligee to tempt the silver sky.
In the post-rain sun,
the glass of car windows sparkle
in the headwrap of your tiara.
Your twin peaks lift and separate.
I watch you,
as if you were applying lipstick in the mirror, and
I see me
Only bigger, bolder, and beautiful.
Still, when young,
we were works-in-progress.
When your construction was in its tenth year,
I was seven.
I sat under you. I had no front teeth.
My fringe was tight across my forehead,
kept put with a single bobby.
My clothes were your hand-me-downs:
belt buckles, pressed nickel buttons,
metal zips that no longer slid
up along their track.
I was born whole, if immature.
Some days it pleased me that your progress lagged.
You had arrived adult-sized but in pieces.
You were unable to clap,
like a baby in a brace.
My teasing never slowed you.
Unworried by my completeness,
you leaned across, reached, stretching,
desperate to catch up.
It took a toll, your wiry fingers and bitten nails.
The lives spent for you.
The money.
And yet when your two steady hands finally met,
you looked, not as if you had grown up overnight,
but as if you'd always been that way:
mature, well-rounded, over-developed.
Your bend,
the curve of the famed siren with one rib removed,
makes you different from all the others of your kind.
Your graceful swirls are held by girders en pointe.
So fine is your connection to the earth
my arms would fit around your toes or
the top of your thighs if I were ever to hug you.
Tug boats, rubber bellied midwives,
know your territorial waters.
Ships sail between your knees —
and you let them.
I look on knowingly at your disasters.
I listen to your full orchestral detail
Of the short-fallings of the men who made you.
Inwardly, I'm thankful for my life of
selecting fabric softener,
ironing flat the heels of my shoes.
But there are times,
growing more frequent
as I pass through half-life,
when I want to fly up where you are,
above the