A woman, for whom I’d written the previous poem, read it to her daughter over the phone, almost as it was created. Her daughter laughed. The woman said: “She keeps me grounded”. This was my IMprov response:

She keeps you grounded?
Stuck
in what?
The muck
and the mire?
The dirt that’s the death
of romance’s fire?

The young think they know
what it means to feel passion’s glow.
But they don’t.
It’s only youthful lust.
As age comes, so arrives patience
and trust.

And the romance that fuels
our aged desire
is the very thing which pulls
us out of the mire
and sends our passionate flames
soaring ever higher.

So when we fall, exhausted,
in each other’s arms again,
we’ll arise, phoenix-like,
from where youth has never been.