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This is the ninth of a series featuring Canadian writers' true tales of love.

For most of my 30s, when menopause was merely a distant Latinate abstraction, I lived in Saskatoon. To get us through the dark and cold nights, a group of us put on an annual erotic poetry festival in mid-February. I'd always write a new poem for the event, and I had no trouble being bawdy and outrageous: "My new old man, he's so good/in bed does tricks/can come on his head," etc. Once I wrote a series called The Penis Poems. It took me 12 takes to scratch the surface of what I needed to say.

The object of my verbal eroticism was Patrick Lane, the man I started living with in 1978 when I was 30 and he was 39. When we started out, we spooned in a narrow cot with one of those black-and-white striped mattresses and collapsible metal frames. We were at a summer school of the arts in Saskatchewan, and though we were married to other people, he had moved into my room and stayed there for the week. Now, it seems outrageous, but it didn't at the time.

At the end of the summer, we headed for Toronto in an old car and with little money in our pockets. We stopped at Lake Winnipeg and wrote letters to our spouses telling them we wouldn't be coming back. It was the first they knew of it. Any guilt I might have felt was blunted by lust and the deep, improbable certainty that I'd love this man forever.

The misnamed "double beds" in the cheap motels along the Trans-Canada sagged in the middle. Then, that was a benefit: Every night we wound around each other like twins in a womb who needed the smell and warmth of one another to survive. Now, we have a queen with a Posturepedic mattress, and long for a king-size. I throw off enough heat, Patrick tells me, to thaw a glacier. And, as if the melt has already started to runnel and soak in, by morning my side of the bed is wet from head to toe.

I always thought I'd never have a problem generating libidinous material, but a few years ago at a similar festival in Victoria, I ran into a wall. I found myself reading the same old stuff. It didn't seem to matter to the audience — writers repeat themselves all the time — but it bothered me.

It wasn't that our passion had dampened. Patrick's touch or glance could still make my body flare. Sometimes, to the discomfort of our friends, we teased and flirted as if we'd just met at a party and were about to sneak off to the cloakroom. I wondered, then, why I could no longer turn the air blue with poetry. The answer came fairly quickly. We were an older couple who'd been together almost 30 years. Surely, at my age, it would be indecent to talk about our sex lives, and anyway, who'd be interested? As soon as I knew what was troubling me, I was inspired to write something new. I called it My Last Erotic Poem.

Who wants to hear about
two old farts getting it on
in the back seat of a Buick,
in the garden shed among vermiculite,
in the kitchen where we should be drinking
Ovaltine and saying no? Who wants to hear
about 26 years of screwing,
our once-not-unattractive flesh
now loose as unbaked pizza dough
hanging between two hands before it's tossed?
Who wants/to hear about two old lovers
slapping together like water hitting mud,
hair where there shouldn't be
and little where there should,
my bunioned foot sliding
up your bony calf, your calloused hands
sinking in the quickslide of my belly,
our faithless bums crepitus, collapsed?
We have to wear our glasses to see down there!
When you whisper what you want I can't hear,
but do it anyway, and somehow get it right. Face it,
some nights we'd rather eat a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar
or watch a movie starring Nick Nolte who looks worse than us.
Some nights we'd rather stroke the cats.
Who wants to know when we get it going
we're revved up, like the first time — honest —
like the first time, if only we could remember it
our old bodies doing what you know
bodies do, worn and beautiful and shameless.

Patrick has made me promise not to read the poem when he's in the audience. "We're not that far gone," he says, and we're not, but there's some truth in the hyperbole of those lines.

If I were to write a Part 2, I'd have to include the sad expansion of our bed over the years we've been together. We still do it, though, as the poem says, measuring the vigour and passion of our lovemaking by how long it takes to bounce one, then two, cats off the foot of bed. We do it in forgiving candlelight and in the no-mercy glare of a mid-summer afternoon, and we lie naked on top of the sheets, our eyes finding the lovely and familiar in each other's skin.

Sometimes, like Leonard, "I ache in the places where I used to play," but there's a sweetness to being a lover in an old relationship, a sweetness in the heart and on the tongue, though Patrick says I taste more and more like salt.

Lorna Crozier has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Governor-General's Award. Her latest book is The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems. She'll be reading at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in October.