181 Aging poems

It scares me to watch a woman hobble along the sidewalk, hunched adagio leaning on — there’s so much fear I could draw you a diagram of the great reduction all of us will soon be way-back-when. The wedding is over. Summer is over. Life please explain. This book is nearly halfway read. I don’t have a pill for that, the doctor said.

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension Fallen from my prime, when company Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention, Before time took my leafy hours away. My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found Itself tart recompense for what was lost In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground Has no apocalypse or pentecost. I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought, And cozy women dead that by my side Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not Remembering how in my youth I cried.

In real life you are aging at the rate of a short-lived sitcom and the only kind of loneliness worth laughing about is throwing out half a frozen meal for two because leftovers are never funnier the next day. In real life there is no such thing as a gritty reboot — it’s just fucking gritty all the time, mate, because your best-laid plans are always someone else’s chance to crash a car into the crowd at a men’s rights charity concert. In real life the nice guys pull out of the race when their tires are slashed or they turn back because they think they left the iron on and no one adheres to sports film clichés anyway — we’re all selfish and we want that trophy. In real life you’ll never make it out of your homophobic small town alive, so your left hand begs for water while your right hand swings an ax your left foot drags a church bell while your right foot taps — S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S.

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not: it's newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff, every thought visible,—pure knowledge, mind in action—shining through the skull. I saw one, a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning. She mopped the green floor, dusted bookshelves, all cloth and concentration, Queen of the moon. You can tell, with the bald, that the air speaks to them differently, touches their heads with exquisite expression. As she danced her laundry dance with the motes, everything she ever knew skittered under her scalp. It was clear just from the texture of her head, she was about to raise her arms to the sky; I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, roar, to let the big win resonate in the little room.

We need the ceremony of one another, meals served , more love, more handling of one another with love, less casting out of those who are not of our own household. ‘This turkey is either not cooked enough or it’s tough.’ The culture is in late imperial decline. The children don’t like dark meat or pepper. They say the mother sometimes deliberately puts pepper on the things the grown-ups like better. Less casting out of those in our own household with whom we disagree. The cat will not hear of cat food, he waves it away. He has seen the big thrush taken from the cold box, dressed and put in the hot. ‘If I set the alarm clock, will you turn on the oven when it goes off?’ then she went off to see the profane dancers of the afternoon. It was done. The fact that I don’t like his pictures should not obscure the facts that he is a good man that many admire his work (his canvases threaten my existence and I hope mine his, the intolerant bastard) that we are brothers in humanity & the art. Often it does, though. The cat has followed Hazard from his studio, he looks mean. He upbraids the innocent dog and all of us, he casts us out. ‘There’s pepper in this gravy. We’re supposed to eat dry turkey and you’ve put pepper in the gravy.’ The meal is served , nevertheless with felt love, some godless benediction. The grown ones have wine after the other bottle. They cast out a lot. ‘The dancers this afternoon were, well, thinky ,’ she says. She toys with her glass. ‘He is strictly a one-joke painter,’ he replies, ‘painted that one twenty years ago and is still putting pepper on it, ha hah. Finish your turkey you two and leave a little gravy for someone else.’ The cat is taking notes against his own household. He watches. Hazard would like once to see things with the cat’s eyes, flat. Now it is time to go to bed. Hungry and alone most go to bed in this decline and in all others, yet Someone has fed us again and blessed us with the manners of bohemia. Among barbarians, a lot is expected of us, ceremony-wise. We rise to that expectation.

In her nineties and afraid of weather and of falling if she wandered far outside her door, my mother took to strolling in the house. Around and round she’d go, stalking into corners, backtrack, then turn and speed down hallway, stop almost at doorways, skirt a table, march up to the kitchen sink and wheel to left, then swing into the bathroom, almost stumble on a carpet there. She must have walked a hundred miles or more among her furniture and family pics, mementos of her late husband. Exercising heart and limb, outwalking stroke, attack, she strode, not restless like a lion in zoo, but with a purpose and a gait, and kept her eyes on heaven’s gate.

He’ll have been the last of his kind here then. The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch, out-offices and cow cabins, the patch of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in— all of it a century out of fashion— all giving way to the quiet rising damp of hush and vacancy once he is gone. Those long contemplations at the fire, cats curling at the door, the dog’s lame waltzing, the kettle, the candle and the lamp— all still, all quenched, all darkened— the votives and rosaries and novenas, the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart, the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock, the tractor that took him into town and back for the pension cheque and messages and pub, the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot, everything will amount to nothing much. Everything will slowly disappear. And some grandniece, a sister’s daughter’s daughter, one blue August in ten or fifteen years will marry well and will inherit it: the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land. They’ll come to see it in a hired car. The kindly Liverpudlian she’s wed, in concert with a local auctioneer, will post a sign to offer Site for Sale. The acres that he labored in will merge with a neighbor’s growing pasturage and all the decades of him will begin to blur, easing, as the far fields of his holding did, up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.

1. How account for dimming of the lights baggage of old age tagged and waiting? or light tricks in snow at sun-up? waiting in line waiting in line come sundown watching the horizon eyes glowing. 2. Who not the other myself my prisoner night flesh ear-skewered music in natural air screams   well-deep seep to the brain-root days Treblinka nights guilt guts the ferret in my cage sanity puddles the floor. 3. In memory sickness eyes unlace open as last night’s boots a glacier of light saps the air remember the torturer’s tinnitus starts the day. 4. The   irrationality of it mob noise angels struck from the block of darkness a sunlit sky breaks through in shrapnel hard screaming night feather touch troops improvising for the kill panic my enemy my nail-hold. 5. Of the texture of elbows shattered and stairwell falls hallucinations of confession rush to stop pain. 6. Andean snow-stats blind me the flashlight of the Burglar of Death flares and holds on my eyes. 7. In the Feast Halls ghosts linger feeding avoiding dogs and the memory of cracked bones. 8. Present danger colors hiss from a blue masque bone-bonded Autumn in no year’s season a nerve twitches across the path. 9. Planets by lamplight street laughter embraced in being parallel lines collapse curbside cornices fall from a stranger’s dream moon-sand ears the inhabitants lean in to hear.

Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces. Signs are taken for wonders.  ‘We would see a sign!’ The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness.  In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind.  I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.  Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving.  Gives too late What’s not believed in, or is still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion.  Gives too soon Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear.  Think Neither fear nor courage saves us.  Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism.  Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours.  Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house.  Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact? These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors.  What will the spider do Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay?  De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims, And an old man driven by the Trades To a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

No matter how she tilts her head to hear she sees the irritation in their eyes. She knows how they can read a small rejection, a little judgment, in every What did you say? So now she doesn’t say What? or Come again? She lets the syllables settle, hoping they form some sort of shape that she might recognize. When they don’t, she smiles with everyone else, and then whoever was talking turns to her and says, “Break wooden coffee, don’t you know?” She pulls all she can focus into the face to know if she ought to nod or shake her head. In that long space her brain talks to itself. The person may turn away as an act of mercy, leaving her there in a room full of understanding with nothing to cover her, neither sound nor silence .