181 Aging poems

Local his discourse, not yet exemplary, Nowadays he is old, the translator, So old he is practically transparent. Good things and otherwise, evils done Come home to him, too close to the bone And so little transformed, Him so transparent, They float in and out of his window. Killing fields and the pumpkin patch, The combat boot putrid in a cherry tree, Stroke on stroke the mortal build-up, All the constraint, all the letting go, So insistent in his attentions That he needs a breathing block. For lack of a monitor he might levitate, The testy old bird, at his wondow; He needs an animal, a sure thing, One to imagine, at last. Speechless As bedrock, a rough reminder of that. A dog might be vigilant enough, Intact, all heart, a yellow desert dog. Avoirdupoids. A leopard? Markings Regular, talons to swat Any hurt away. Knowing Hunger, not the greed. Sufficient Unto itself, svelte, clean of limb; Free through self-discipline, yes, Yes, through self-discipline free, And fierce, yet doing no violence The wild by right he will restore To a holy place, in time. For want of that sort of a beast, He might make do with a frog.

—on my seventy-ninth birthday Nobody in the widow’s household ever celebrated anniversaries. In the secrecy of my room I would not admit I cared that my friends were given parties. Before I left town for school my birthday went up in smoke in a fire at City Hall that gutted the Department of Vital Statistics. If it weren’t for a census report of a five-year-old White Male sharing my mother’s address at the Green Street tenement in Worcester I’d have no documentary proof that I exist. You are the first, my dear, to bully me into these festive occasions. Sometimes, you say, I wear an abstracted look that drives you up the wall, as though it signified distress or disaffection. Don’t take it so to heart. Maybe I enjoy not-being as much as being who I am. Maybe it’s time for me to practice growing old. The way I look at it, I’m passing through a phase: gradually I’m changing to a word. Whatever you choose to claim of me is always yours; nothing is truly mine except my name. I only borrowed this dust.

They’re waiting to be murdered, Or evicted. Soon They expect to have nothing to eat. In the meantime, they sit. A violent pain is coming, they think. It will start in the heart And climb into the mouth. They’ll be carried off in stretchers, howling. Tonight they watch the window Without exchanging a word. It has rained, and now it looks Like it’s going to snow a little. I see him get up to lower the shades. If their window stays dark, I know his hand has reached hers Just as she was about to turn on the lights.

I saw her in a Broadway car, The woman I might grow to be; I felt my lover look at her And then turn suddenly to me. Her hair was dull and drew no light And yet its color was as mine; Her eyes were strangely like my eyes Tho' love had never made them shine. Her body was a thing grown thin, Hungry for love that never came; Her soul was frozen in the dark Unwarmed forever by love's flame. I felt my lover look at her And then turn suddenly to me, — His eyes were magic to defy The woman I shall never be.

Old Man, or Lad's-love,—in the name there's nothing To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree, Growing with rosemary and lavender. Even to one that knows it well, the names Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is: At least, what that is clings not to the names In spite of time. And yet I like the names. The herb itself I like not, but for certain I love it, as some day the child will love it Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush Whenever she goes in or out of the house. Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still But half as tall as she, though it is as old; So well she clips it. Not a word she says; And I can only wonder how much hereafter She will remember, with that bitter scent, Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door, A low thick bush beside the door, and me Forbidding her to pick. As for myself, Where first I met the bitter scent is lost. I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one. I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

The old man drew the line for his son, the executive: “I don’t want you spending money on me! (not as long as there are fathers)”, the line ageless as the independence of time. Musters tears and overflows the inner ear, yet does not matter. It can not cure frailty. I seek him who will seek me out and will believe what I do not believe (that is my frailty). “Sit down here with us,” he says, “You don’t have to impress anyone. Here is my hand. Your age is of no significance.” Ah! I move closer to his mouth and look into his eyes. I do not avert mine, there is no reason to, or retreat into a kindly smile. Ah, companero, you were born on the wrong day when God was paradoxical. You’ll have to find yourself an old dog.

To Nani Panayíotopoulo And yet we should consider how we go forward. To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls. And yet we should consider towards what we go forward, not as our pain would have it, and our hungry children and the chasm between us and the companions calling from the opposite shore; nor as the bluish light whispers it in an improvised hospital, the pharmaceutic glimmer on the pillow of the youth operated on at noon; but it should be in some other way, I would say like the long river that emerges from the great lakes enclosed deep in Africa, that was once a god and then became a road and a benefactor, a judge and a delta; that is never the same, as the ancient wise men taught, and yet always remains the same body, the same bed, and the same Sign, the same orientation. I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace. Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music that it’s slowly sinking and we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. If pain is human we are not human beings merely to suffer pain; that’s why I think so much these days about the great river, this meaning that moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. This current that goes its way and that is not so different from the blood of men, from the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts, without the daily tremor for trivialities or even for important things; when they look straight ahead like the traveller who is used to gauging his way by the stars, not like us, the other day, gazing at the enclosed garden of a sleepy Arab house, behind the lattices the cool garden changing shape, growing larger and smaller, we too changing, as we gazed, the shape of our desire and our hearts, at noon’s precipitation, we the patient dough of a world that throws us out and kneads us, caught in the embroidered nets of a life that was as it should be and then became dust and sank into the sands leaving behind it only that vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree. Cairo, 20 June ’42

You are old, Father William, the young man cried, The few locks which are left you are grey; You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man, Now tell me the reason I pray. In the days of my youth, Father William replied, I remember'd that youth would fly fast, And abused not my health and my vigour at first That I never might need them at last. You are old, Father William, the young man cried, And pleasures with youth pass away, And yet you lament not the days that are gone, Now tell me the reason I pray. In the days of my youth, Father William replied, I remember'd that youth could not last; I thought of the future whatever I did, That I never might grieve for the past. You are old, Father William, the young man cried, And life must be hastening away; You are chearful, and love to converse upon death! Now tell me the reason I pray. I am chearful, young man, Father William replied, Let the cause thy attention engage; In the days of my youth I remember'd my God! And He hath not forgotten my age.

He is tight at first, stiff, stands there atilt tossing the green fluff tennis ball down the side alley, but soon he’s limber, he’s letting it fly and the black lab lops back each time. These are the true lovers, this dog, this man, and when the dog stops to pee, the old guy hurries him back, then hurls the ball farther away.  Now his mother dodders out, she’s old as the sky, wheeling her green tank with its sweet vein, breath. She tips down the path he’s made for her, grass rippling but trim, soft underfoot, to survey the yard, every inch of it in fine blossom, set-stone, pruned miniature, split rails docked along the front walk, antique watering cans down-spread—up huffs the dog again with his mouthy ball— so flowers seem to spill out, red geraniums, grand blue asters, and something I have no name for, wild elsewhere in our world but here a thing to tend. To call for, and it comes.

Back in a yard where ringers groove a ditch, These four in shirtsleeves congregate to pitch Dirt-burnished iron. With appraising eye, One sizes up a peg, hoists and lets fly— A clang resounds as though a smith had struck Fire from a forge. His first blow, out of luck, Rattles in circles. Hitching up his face, He swings, and weight once more inhabits space, Tumbles as gently as a new-laid egg. Extended iron arms surround their peg Like one come home to greet a long-lost brother. Shouts from one outpost. Mutters from the other. Now changing sides, each withered pitcher moves As his considered dignity behooves Down the worn path of earth where August flies And sheaves of air in warm distortions rise, To stand ground, fling, kick dust with all the force Of shoes still hammered to a living horse.