181 Aging poems

Worn by wind and weather, all the way to Age we'll go Hand in hand together.

Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age. Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way to know what others see when looking at it. All five of the body’s senses crowd on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds. My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants and the ears are radical dissenters. In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers. Like the window at night, the face reflects too, uncertain how to change when greeting itself (and is it not cruel when another’s face won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?). My mother, my father, and my brother are found in the blurring of feature and expression. Cynicism finds no purchase here; the same cannot be said for sadness (and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw). And while the nose quietly broods like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy, the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows, fills suddenly with questions.

The Canasta Players: Seven at Autumn's Gold We real old. We bell-tolled. We dilate. We stagflate. We sing thin. We shake Schwinn. We shit-doled. You stuff gold.

About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall signals that nature is finished with the organism and we just begin to conceive the use of women (having been all this time more enamored of the fountain than the cistern), we retire to nursing homes, whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors, or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi, where the suicidal waves of angry natives give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly, or the crow’s-nest of this windless office block where the cook is already boiling the last sail. And sitting on the bench like a snowfall of beard expectorated by a cloudy hat, we consider the byproducts of life, such as (to name only the least offensive to the nose) the body itself when it has finally reached that eminence from which all is visible and from which it nonetheless feels the need to move on to a homestead of its dreams like an abandoned chicken coop on the sandy streamside under the tulip poplars, and to words, which result from an instinct for what is impossible: to soften the blow for others, including ourselves.

Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath. The later Yeats was right To think of sex and death And nothing else. Why wait Till we are turning old? My thoughts are hot and cold. I do not waste my breath.

On the crown of his head where the fontanelle pulsed between spongy bones, a bald spot is forming, globed and sleek as a monk’s tonsure. I was the earliest pinch of civilization, the one who laced him into shoe leather when he stumbled into walking upright. “Shoes are unfair to children,” he’d grouse. Through a pane of glass that shivers when the wind kicks up I watch my son walk away. He’s out the door, up the street, around a couple of corners by now. I’m in for life. He trips; my hand flies out; I yank it back.

It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: “No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. Fancy departs: no more invent; Contract thy firmament To compass of a tent. There’s not enough for this and that, Make thy option which of two; Economize the failing river, Not the less revere the Giver, Leave the many and hold the few. Timely wise accept the terms, Soften the fall with wary foot; A little while Still plan and smile, And,—fault of novel germs,— Mature the unfallen fruit. Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who, when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The Baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,— Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.” As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: “Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.”

I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours and days and decades, head to foot, and slim is just a faded photograph. It’s strange how people look away who once would look. I didn’t know I’d undergo this change and be the unseen cover of a book whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker. One reaches for the pleasures of the mind and heart to counteract the loss of quicker knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind, although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer, in case I might attract another geezer.

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.