The title gives the game away before the poem begins: this is a confession, and a mildly outrageous one. Mary F. C. Pratt's speaker is at an outdoor concert, but instead of listening she is staring at the back of a man whose job is to be looked past. The central idea is that desire does not retire with youth. It can sit in a public crowd, perfectly composed and perfectly undetected. That is the poem's comedy, and also its quiet point.
The first sentence sets up a gap between what is said and what is meant. "I have admired your body from afar– / as only an older woman can admire–" is polite, almost decorous, and the title has already told us the real word is "lusting." The dashes work like a raised eyebrow, a pause in which the speaker lets her own euphemism hang there. The phrase "as only an older woman can" claims a seasoned, expert kind of appreciation. Judging by the tone, it also hints at a kind of invisibility, since no one is likely to suspect what she is doing. Then the poem closes the distance in a single line break: "and here you are / the row in front of me." The sound helps. "Afar" and "are" rhyme, and it is the only real rhyme in the poem, so the gap between far and near is closed in sound as well as in space.
The poem also sets up a small chain of watching. The bodyguard is "watching the governor, two rows down," and the speaker is watching the bodyguard. The governor has the power and the bodyguard has the professional duty to look, but the person with no official role has the most fun. Nobody is watching her. The concert, the reason everyone is supposedly there, drops out of the picture entirely.
The second stanza turns to physical detail, and Pratt keeps it restrained. The "mirrored shades" are a bodyguard's armour, lenses that reflect the world rather than reveal the person behind them. When he removes them, the moment feels almost intimate, though he has no idea he is being watched. "Your green shirt / is tight across your shoulders" is the nearest the poem comes to a sensual description. It is plain, specific, and unhurried, with no gushing simile. The short lines let the observation land and then stop, much as a glance would.
Then comes the poem's best moment: "Oh, has the music begun?" It is the only line where the speaker's flustered, inner voice breaks through the cool surface, and it is very funny. She has been so absorbed that she has lost track of the event she paid to attend. The question also shifts the register from composed confession to a startled aside, as if she had been caught out by herself.
Food carries the erotic undertone. The beef is "marinated" and comes "from a plastic box," and the contrast is the joke. A rich, almost sensual word is attached to the most ordinary packaging, and the speaker finds this dazzling anyway. Watching him eat becomes a stand-in for appetite generally. She sees him "finish the beef / and start on the berries," moving from savoury to sweet, and the poem stops there. Nothing happens. He does not turn around, and she does not speak to him. The anticlimax is deliberate, since the desire here is real but has no plan and expects no result.
Formally the poem is free verse in two six-line stanzas, with short lines that sound like speech. Nothing is ornamented, and the flatness works like deadpan delivery. The speaker describes her own lust in the voice of someone reporting what is on the seat in front of her.
That is where its significance lies. Poems about looking at bodies have so often cast a young woman as the object and a man as the looker. Pratt reverses this. The watcher is an older woman, the watched is a muscular man who never knows, and the poem treats her with neither shame nor sentimentality. She is amused by herself, unapologetic, and entirely alive. The poem is small, and it makes its case with a lunchbox and a bowl of berries.