I am 86 and my boyfriend is 91 (Jacobson)

I am 86 and my boyfriend is 91.

Our hot December/December romance is entering its seventh year, my only rival his slow-growing tumor, lately less slow.  But he’s a fighter and we cope.

Now this.

Yet we have it better than most.

We live in separate condos in the same gated community.  It takes me 15 minutes to walk to his place where instead of our afternoon of reading and the PBS news hour before dinner in—or out with family or friends—I can only tap on his den window and wave.  Then it’s another 15 minutes home to my deck to watch the moon alone.    

It’s a beautiful walk, around a large lake with April-happy ducks and geese, turtles basking and forsythia popping.  Last January I saw a pair of coyotes sitting warm haunch to haunch on the ice—dangerous neighbors, our condo association had warned.  Now we have neighbors exponentially more dangerous, some wearing masks, some not.  When I see them coming, I move from our narrow asphalt path onto grass, six feet away, as our governor has mandated.  Sometimes, if not leading a gaggle of children, or wheeling a person in a chair, or lost in each other, they, too, nod and step off.

In 2017 I wrote my boyfriend a Valentine’s Day poem spoken from what I imagined was the far distant future:

BACK THEN              

Back then my early Twenty-first Century brain

thought it would die. It thought each moment was

only a memory of the previous moment

and truth might be a lie eternally true.

Back then a man and a woman sat thigh to thigh

facing forward in a desperate pact                     

to survive the fits of the criminally insane.

They sat like this every weeknight at six.

They sat transfixed inside a digital clock where

night after night the same numbers changed.

Back then they despaired, watching the same hate flame.            

The same holocaust, the same old thumbscrew.

It would have been unbearable

without you.

And now, because I cannot touch his face, it is.  It is unbearable.

Bonnie Jacobson, 1990 Ohio Poet of the Year and recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant, has two poetry collections, Stopping For Time and In Joanna's House; and two chapbooks, On Being Served Apples and Greatest Hits. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and several anthologies and textbooks.

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