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For some time now, I have lived anonymously. No one appears to think it odd. They think the old are, well, what they seem. Yet see that great egret at the marsh's edge, solitary, still? Mere pretense that stillness. His silence is a lie. In his own pond he is of some renown, a stalker, a catcher of fish. Watch him.

When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite. The soul, with nobler resolutions deckt, The body stooping, does herself erect: No mortal parts are requisite to raise Her, that unbodied can her Maker praise. The seas are quiet, when the winds give o’er, So calm are we, when passions are no more: For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness, which age descries. The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home: Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Oh could I raise the darken’d veil, Which hides my future life from me, Could unborn ages slowly sail, Before my view—and could I see My every action painted there, To cast one look I would not dare. There poverty and grief might stand, And dark Despair’s corroding hand, Would make me seek the lonely tomb To slumber in its endless gloom. Then let me never cast a look, Within Fate’s fix’d mysterious book.

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the withered rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest, Like the young hours that lead the tender year Enchantress come! and charm my cares to rest: Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear! A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain, Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain, ‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’ Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure.

This winter's weather it waxeth cold, And frost it freezeth on every hill, And Boreas blows his blast so bold That all our cattle are like to spill. Bell, my wife, she loves no strife; She said unto me quietlye, Rise up, and save cow Crumbock's life! Man, put thine old cloak about thee! He.   O Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? Thou kens my cloak is very thin: It is so bare and over worn, A crickè thereon cannot renn. Then I'll no longer borrow nor lend; For once I'll new apparell'd be; To-morrow I'll to town and spend; For I'll have a new cloak about me. She.  Cow Crumbock is a very good cow: She has been always true to the pail; She has helped us to butter and cheese, I trow, And other things she will not fail. I would be loth to see her pine. Good husband, counsel take of me: It is not for us to go so fine— Man, take thine old cloak about thee! He.   My cloak it was a very good cloak, It hath been always true to the wear; But now it is not worth a groat: I have had it four and forty year'. Sometime it was of cloth in grain: 'Tis now but a sigh clout, as you may see: It will neither hold out wind nor rain; And I'll have a new cloak about me. She.  It is four and forty years ago Sine the one of us the other did ken; And we have had, betwixt us two, Of children either nine or ten: We have brought them up to women and men: In the fear of God I trow they be. And why wilt thou thyself misken? Man, take thine old cloak about thee! He.   O Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? Now is now, and then was then: Seek now all the world throughout, Thou kens not clowns from gentlemen: They are clad in black, green, yellow and blue, So far above their own degree. Once in my life I'll take a view; For I'll have a new cloak about me. She. King Stephen was a worthy peer; His breeches cost him but a crown; He held them sixpence all too dear, Therefore he called the tailor 'lown.' He was a king and wore the crown, And thou'se but of a low degree: It's pride that puts this country down: Man, take thy old cloak about thee! He.   Bell my wife, she loves not strife, Yet she will lead me, if she can; And to maintain an easy life I oft must yield, though I'm good-man. It's not for a man with a woman to threap, Unless he first give o'er the plea: As we began, so will we keep, And I'll take my old cloak about me.

Who can say now, “When I was young, the country was very beautiful? Oaks and willows grew along the rivers and there were many herbs and flowering bushes. The forests were so dense the deer slipped through the cottonwoods and maples unseen.” Who would listen? Who will carry even the vicarious tone of that time? In the old days age was honored. Today it’s whim, the whelp without habitat. Who will now admit that he is either old or young or knows anything? All that went out with the forests.

Radiant child of Leto, farworking Lord Apollo, with lyre in hand and golden plectrum, you sang to the gods on Mount Olympus almost as soon as you were born. You sang, and the Muses sang in answer, and together your voices so delighted all your deathless elders that their perfect happiness was made more perfect still. What was it, though, that overwhelmed them, that suffused, astonished, even the endless ether? Was it the freshest, most wonderful stops of breath, the flawless intervals and scales whose harmonies were mimicking in sound the beauty of the gods themselves, or what you joined to that, what you were singing of, our balked desires, the miseries we suffer at your indifferent hands, devastation and bereavement, old age and death? Farworking, radiant child, what do you know about us? Here is my father, half blind, and palsied, at the toilet, he’s shouting at his penis, Piss, you! Piss! Piss! but the penis (like the heavenly host to mortal prayers) is deaf and dumb; here, too, my mother with her bad knee, on the eve of surgery, hobbling by the bathroom, pausing, saying, who are you talking to in there? and he replies, no one you would know, sweetheart. Supernal one, in your untested mastery, your easy excellence, with nothing to overcome, and needing nothing but the most calamitous and abject stories to prove how powerful you are, how truly free, watch them as they laugh so briefly, godlike, better than gods, if only for a moment in which what goes wrong is converted to a rightness, if only because now she’s hobbling back to bed where she won’t sleep, if only because he pees at last, missing the bowl, and has to get down on his knees to wipe it up. You don’t know anything about us.

Old Woman Nature naturally has a bag of bones tucked away somewhere. a whole room full of bones! A scattering of hair and cartilage bits in the woods. A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it. a shellmound a bone flake in a streambank. A purring cat, crunching the mouse head first, eating on down toward the tail-- The sweet old woman calmly gathering firewood in the moon . . . Don't be shocked, She's heating you some soup. VII, '81, Seeing Ichikawa Ennosuke in "Kurozuka"—"Demoness"— at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo

“Dead people don’t like olives,” I told my partners in eighth grade dancing class, who never listened as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. The dead people I often consulted nodded their skulls in unison while I flung my black velvet cape over my shoulders and glowered from deep-set, burning eyes, walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, crazy for cheerleaders and poems. At Hamden High football games, girls in short pleated skirts pranced and kicked, and I longed for their memorable thighs. They were friendly—poets were mascots— but never listened when I told them that dead people didn’t like olives. Instead the poet, wearing his cape, continued to prowl in solitude intoning inscrutable stanzas as halfbacks and tackles made out, Friday nights after football, on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms with magnanimous cheerleaders. But, decades later, when the dead have stopped blathering about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders waiting for hip replacements, while a lascivious, doddering poet, his burning eyes deep-set in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.

Los Angeles Across from the gorgeous dog park, men dream against poodle-pissed trees — their pillows made from breath captured in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate climate offers respite. Let us suppose they have tales, here in this city where filmed stories turn a mint. All around, one wide screen — the dark hills due north pixel-pocked with villa lights. Below, streets hemmed with haggard brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies ever unfolding. Who is pitching this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.” Voiceover:After the Integration Apocalypse, one man must find his way in a land where the sole survivors who look or speak like him are those rendered disturbed and indigent