5 Comments

1. 

   Emily Lisker January 29, 2014

   I AGREE COMPLETELY!! I love AUTHENTIC aged faces.
   The best face lift is a smile!

   Emily

2. 

   Emily Lisker January 29, 2014

   I love looking at photos of Georgia O’Keefe and Mick Jagger as mature artists. What’s not to love about a face that has lived.

3. 

   jonfrankel January 30, 2014

   Oh,me too!Do you know Donne’s poem The Autumnal? It’s a beautiful love poem in praise of middle age. Unfortunately, the last lines are dedicated to how disgust old faces are! But i love old faces. I suppose it’s different HAVING one. The soon to be discovered country.

4. 

   Emily Lisker January 30, 2014

   Thanks Jon, I will look up the poem. I tell my husband all the time that he is even more handsome than when we first met 28 years ago. His beard has become Santa Claus white and his bright blue eyes shine. I’ve always wanted to be an old lady and at age 12 I drew pictures of myself aged in my sketchbook. Auntie Em! Now I am that old lady with spirals of long white hair, witches hair, kids always say. I bake wearing a bun. I have smile wrinkles, dimples, and worry lines but I love them. I want to know, will I get droopy earlobes like Willie Nelson and the Buddha? Time will tell. I want to wear more purple.

5. 

   Emily Lisker January 30, 2014

   Elegy IX: The Autumnal

   By John Donne 1572–1631 John Donne

   No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
   As I have seen in one autumnal face.
   Young beauties force our love, and that’s a rape,
   This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.
   If ’twere a shame to love, here ’twere no shame;
   Affection here takes reverence’s name.
   Were her first years the golden age? That’s true,
   But now she’s gold oft tried and ever new.
   That was her torrid and inflaming time,
   This is her tolerable tropic clime.
   Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence,
   He in a fever wishes pestilence.
   Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were,
   They were Love’s graves, for else he is no where.
   Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit
   Vow’d to this trench, like an anachorit;
   And here till hers, which must be his death, come,
   He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.
   Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev’rywhere
   In progress, yet his standing house is here:
   Here where still evening is, not noon nor night,
   Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.
   In all her words, unto all hearers fit,
   You may at revels, you at council, sit.
   This is Love’s timber, youth his underwood;
   There he, as wine in June, enrages blood,
   Which then comes seasonabliest when our taste
   And appetite to other things is past.
   Xerxes’ strange Lydian love, the platan tree,
   Was lov’d for age, none being so large as she,
   Or else because, being young, nature did bless
   Her youth with age’s glory, barrenness.
   If we love things long sought, age is a thing
   Which we are fifty years in compassing;
   If transitory things, which soon decay,
   Age must be loveliest at the latest day.
   But name not winter faces, whose skin’s slack,
   Lank as an unthrift’s purse, but a soul’s sack;
   Whose eyes seek light within, for all here’s shade;
   Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made;
   Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,
   To vex their souls at resurrection:
   Name not these living death’s-heads unto me,
   For these, not ancient, but antique be.
   I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay
   With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.
   Since such love’s natural lation is, may still
   My love descend, and journey down the hill,
   Not panting after growing beauties. So,
   I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.