Floy of the Desert

What women sometimes call "The Change"
Is metaphor enough for me,
The continuity, the loss,
The sundering of the cycle

That linked living to reproduce
More lives to living just to live,
A stage of life men should envy,
Free from the chance to reproduce.

Would that our minds, male and female,
Our souls if you wish, anima
And animus, experienced
A phase adjacent to striving,

When the trajectory of life
Carried past opportunity
To project indefinitely
Into some heavenly future

And found all the free-falling joy
Of knowing success or failure,
Trivial terms, were behind us,
And now we could only travel

To our ineluctable ends
Without any further detours,
That is, if souls were like bodies,
Women's bodies to be exact,

And put aside eternity
While there was still time to be this,
To be moving, sprightly, along--
Grandmother's sly hypothesis.