Aesthetics

free verse, and short. Just the way I like it.

How do I keep her

attractive after all these years?

The gentle curve of her body

straightens with time.

Her hair,

once a place to bury my face,

smells like discount shampoo.

I don’t tell jokes anymore,

the peal of her laughter

once so addictive,

no longer satisfies.

Why do we fall in love?

Why does the heart

Show us what we want,

Then gradually take it away? 

Reviews

[Leyla Hess]

Strange, how the beautiful and the aesthetic can dissolve so easily into meaningless (the aesthetes may say, formless) sensory impressions. Most discussion of the aesthetic does, though, involve the concept of form, which leads me to ask: why have you chosen the free verse for this piece? My intuition is to say that you are dealing with the anti-aesthetic, the anti-form that we cannot find beautiful--but that is a philosophical discourse of which I have too little knowledge to say anything that even vaguely coheres. There is, perhaps, an irony at work here as well; Goethe had the intuition that the art mimes microcosmically the sum total (or, to phrase more precisely, some concept) of Nature. This concept, this Nature-in-itself, is necessarily processual, and necessarily involves decay. By extension, the process of art, the process of the aesthetic and of the beautiful, must be accompanied by a process of decomposition (I have attempted to parse this dualism in some of my own works). Such process is brushed against here as well, I believe. I apologize for the lengthy and perhaps meandering commentary; these concepts are recently of great interest to me, and I wonder how other writers--particularly my contemporaries--are wont to parse them. If you can elucidate this for me in any way, it would be much appreciated.

(As a side note, the invocation of William Kent's phrase, "Nature abhors a straight line." wins a certain amount of favor from me.)

[LJW]

Excellent

Compact, easily relatable, not trite.

(the use of "discount shampoo" gets this an easy A in my class)

[cwwood]

So said my creative writing teacher. Are you actually a teacher? Also I'm glad you liked it.

[LJW]

Oh no way, definitely not a teacher. Lover of the written and spoken word...writer of both. Check out The Blue Boat on my page
I write with many different voices and the voice I used for that piece is a voice closet to yours. :-)

[jemaral]

There is some truth to this although i beleive that not everything you love in a person can be stripped away by time and as time passes there are always new things to discover and love in the object of your affection.

[cwwood]

I agree that it isn't exclusive. maybe sometimes, to use your word, it's affection. I often find myself writing about communication, specifically about relationships. It seems to me, you can't just rely on the love, or it just might fade. participation is important. After your comment I feel I might have to back and clarify my point a bit. Thanks for the feedback.