181 Aging poems

Snake walks with that old squiggly stick, walks slow down by the waterfall, from stone to stone down by the waterfall, shuffling on his bare feet while dancing on the edge of it. Now shimmer that, now shimmer this, while now just one, an Old One steps the beat of it. How may he walk with that old squirmy stick? Soft, soft he goes, and gathers sun. Soft, soft he goes, he has no bones. Soft, soft he goes, and gathers wind. About his neck, a bone flute hums the flux of it. Something congeals and flows. Snake says, just spirit matters.

An old woman in a floor-length housecoat had become sunset to me, west-facing. Turquoise, sage, or rose, she leans out of her second floor window, chin slumped in her palm, and gazes at the fenced property line between us, the cars beached in the driveway, the creeping slide of light across shingles. When the window shuts, dusk becomes blush and bruises, projected on vinyl siding. Housecoats breathe across the sky like frail clouds.

For WCW Sorrow is my corner store where jack-o’-lantern balloons get high on the last helium. The endcap is gold today with numbered bags of Werther’s Original. No one is Werther. Last night a newscaster mentioned an “elderly victim.” Don’t call me that. I’m old and obdurate.

She wears the run-down slippers of a local and in her arms, five rare protea wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones. Our hands can’t help it and she lets us touch. Her brother grows them for her, upcountry. She’s spending the day on Oahu with her flowers and her dogs.   Protea for four dogs’ graves, two for her favorite. She’ll sit with him into the afternoon and watch the ocean from Koolau. An old woman’s paradise, she tells us, and pets the flowers’ soft, pink ears.

I feel older, younger, both at once. Every time I win, I lose. Every time I count, I forget and must begin again. I must begin again, and again I must begin. Every time I lose, I win and must begin again. Everything I plan must wait, and having to wait has made me old, and the older I get, the more I wait, and everything I’m waiting for has already been planned. I feel sadder, wiser, neither together. Everything is almost true, and almost true is everywhere. I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once. I end in beginning, in ending I find that beginning is the first thing to do. I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating, so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping. I must stop my stopping and start to start— I can end at the beginning or begin at the end. I feel older, younger, both at once.

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage That held as much as he should ever know On earth again of home, paused warily. The road was his with not a native near; And Eben, having leisure, said aloud, For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon Again, and we may not have many more; The bird is on the wing, the poet says, And you and I have said it here before. Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill, And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood, Since you propose it, I believe I will." Alone, as if enduring to the end A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, He stood there in the middle of the road Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn. Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim. Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child Down tenderly, fearing it may awake, He set the jug down slowly at his feet With trembling care, knowing that most things break; And only when assured that on firm earth It stood, as the uncertain lives of men Assuredly did not, he paced away, And with his hand extended paused again: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this In a long time; and many a change has come To both of us, I fear, since last it was We had a drop together. Welcome home!" Convivially returning with himself, Again he raised the jug up to the light; And with an acquiescent quaver said: "Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might. "Only a very little, Mr. Flood— For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do." So, for the time, apparently it did, And Eben evidently thought so too; For soon amid the silver loneliness Of night he lifted up his voice and sang, Secure, with only two moons listening, Until the whole harmonious landscape rang— "For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out, The last word wavered; and the song being done, He raised again the jug regretfully And shook his head, and was again alone. There was not much that was ahead of him, And there was nothing in the town below— Where strangers would have shut the many doors That many friends had opened long ago.

Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton. It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it with me—this other thing I will become at death, and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk, my rival. What will the living see of me if they should open my grave but my bones that will stare at them through hollow sockets and bared teeth. I write this to warn my friends not to be shocked at my changed attitude toward them, but to be aware that I have it in me to be someone other than I am, and I write to ask forgiveness that death is not wholesome for friendships, that bones do not talk, have no quarrel with me, do not even know I exist. A machine called skeleton will take my place in the minds of others when I am dead among the living, and that machine will make it obvious that I have died to be identified by bones that have no speech, no thought, no mind to speak of having let themselves be carried once around in me, as at my service at the podium or as I lay beside my love or when I held my child at birth or embraced a friend or shook a critic's hand or held a pen to sign a check or book or wrote a farewell letter to a love or held my penis at the bowl or lay my hand upon my face at the mirror and approved of it. There is Ignatow, it will be said, looking down inside the open grave. I'll be somewhere in my poems, I think, to be mistaken for my bones, but There's Ignatow will be said. I say to those who persist, just read what I have written. I'll be there, held together by another kind of structure, of thought and imagery, mind and matter, love and longing, tensions opposite, such as the skeleton requires to stand upright, to move with speed, to sit with confidence, my friend the skeleton and I its friend, shielding it from harm.

Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians, amped up to dinosaur proportions, test drove their equipment through our ears. Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs, as if they wished that they could knock us quite literally dead. We called that fun in 1970, when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving. I’m here to tell you that they were, and many of us did, despite ourselves, though the road from there to here is paved with dead brain cells, parents shocked to silence, and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood the quaking tint and texture of red jelly. Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads to show where we have been; we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin to show what we were thinking when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn, and Death kept blinking. But here I stand, an average-looking man staring at a room where someone blond in braids with a beautiful belief in answers is still asking questions. Through the silence in my dead ear, I can almost hear the future whisper to the past: it says that this is not a test and everybody passes.

Half of my life is gone, and I have let The years slip from me and have not fulfilled The aspiration of my youth, to build Some tower of song with lofty parapet. Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret Of restless passions that would not be stilled, But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, Kept me from what I may accomplish yet; Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,— A city in the twilight dim and vast, With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,— And hear above me on the autumnal blast The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

A STUDY IN AN EMOTION "'Tis but a vague, invarious delight. As gold that rains about some buried king. As the fine flakes, When tourists frolicking Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes And start to inspect some further pyramid; As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath Their transitory step and merriment, Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus Gains yet another crust Of useless riches for the occupant, So I, the fires that lit once dreams Now over and spent, Lie dead within four walls And so now love Rains down and so enriches some stiff case, And strews a mind with precious metaphors, And so the space Of my still consciousness Is full of gilded snow, The which, no cat has eyes enough To see the brightness of."