Age Before Beauty
You’re so handsome, yet you have eyes for me.
And you’re the right size for me, your face upturned
for kisses, my back bent as to a fountain.
I hope you’ll stay, I guess, through all my days
though that would mean you’d have to face an end
you’ll come to see one day from miles away.
Right now it seems limitless, our time together,
you talking to me about anything but the weather,
me mining myself for reminiscences that you’re
as hungry for as you are for the helpless attention
I pay you, so pleasantly uncomfortable for us both.
You see our future in the world as it is. My last
impressions of love you’ve made my first. We don’t
care to know how to get out of this.
*
Jerl Surratt’s poems have been published in The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review and in other journals and two anthologies. He is a 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee and was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Foundation’s annual poetry prize by final judge Marie Howe.
Sounds like my wife and me, met late in life, now 16 years ago.
So beautiful.