Seeing a beautiful young woman at 80
is different for me.

Instead of seeing only her beauty,
I see her fast forwarded into the future
when her beauty,

like the transitory nature of life,
will be gone.

And I see the older woman in
the making within her.

If my vision were better, I would
see the skeleton, the death
beneath her beauty

and the fact that beauty,
like one’s life, is as if illusionary
when it is no more.

Bob Boyd