181 Aging poems

A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to die. I bluffed, “The doctors think that therapy might help you walk again.” “They’re liars, all of them,” he muttered. Bedfast was never how he hoped to go. “In bed you think of everything,” he whispered with a shrug, “you think of all your life.” I knew he meant my mother. Without her he was never what he might have been, and everyone who knew him knew it. Nothing could take her place— not the cars he loved to drive, not the money he could earn at will, not the roads he knew by heart from Florida to Saranac, not the two replacement wives who never measured up. Fed now by family or strangers, carried to the john, shaved and changed by hired help, this independent man turned silent at the end. Only my wife could reach him for his private needs. What no one else could do for him, he let her do. She talked to him and held his hand, the left. She helped him bless himself and prayed beside him as my mother might have done. “Darling” was his final word for her. Softly, in Arabic.

When I came to this mountainside almost fifty years ago it never occurred to me that there would be an end to it. I went along never thinking about the time when I would have to quit. I imagined—I guess — all this would last forever, if I imagined it at all. Now I'm in my seventies and all I can think about is the time when my life will be here no more. For example, I love being in the woods felling and bucking hardwood trees, stacking and covering the blocks, then a year or two later, hauling them to the woodshed where I stack them again, and split them all winter long into the right size for the weather—then bring them into the house. Now this chore I love so much is seriously painful, and I can see, now, an end to it.

What are you going to do With what is left of yourself Now among the rustling Of your maybe best years? This is not an auto-elegy With me pouring my heart Out into where you Differently stand or sit On the Epidaurus steps. What shall I say to myself Having put myself down On to a public page? Where am I going now? And where are you going Tricked into reading Words of my later life? Let me pretend you are Roughly of my age. Are you a boy or a girl? And what has happened to you? Look at the chirping various Leaves of Mr Graham’s Spanking summer. Where are You at? I know my face Has changed. My hair has blanched Into a wrong disguise Sitting on top of my head. Beside each other perched On the Epidaurus steps. Where am I going to go? Shall I rise to follow The thin sound of the goats Tinkling their bells?

Sometimes she’s Confucian— resolute in privation. . . . Each day, more immobile, hip not mending, legs swollen; still she carries her grief with a hard steadiness. Twelve years uncompanioned, there’s no point longing for what can’t return. This morning, she tells me, she found a robin hunched in the damp dirt by the blossoming white azalea. Still there at noon— she went out in the yard with her 4-pronged metal cane— it appeared to be dying. Tonight, when she looked again, the bird had disappeared and in its place, under the bush, was a tiny egg— “Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”— she carried carefully indoors. “Are you keeping it warm?” I ask—what am I thinking?— And she: “Gail, I don’t want a bird, I want a blue egg.”

too old for vision I must settle for dreams specific forms of cloud (body surrounded by body) every sensation con- ceals a dream fresco figurine sculpture in low relief (a motor halo a mental blue) cleft in the logical space (wilderness or wrack) we have lived on a ladder to the window of a room to which the key is lost (words lost in the music)

Zigging, mid- block, he’s off: on a torn-up, trafficked slab of Second Avenue— his cane sweeping over broken asphalt, like a sapper or an open skiff on back-splashing seas. For a few seconds it’s unclear if he gets the risk, as yellow cabs swoop down and flock at the light. Then, safe home on the other side. And I for one cannot take my eyes off him as he pivots, compassing north. We’re never truly clear. Now he jams himself at pace between a giant planter and cross-braced scaffold newly set up at Finnegans. And wham. The guy is smack on his ass, un-staring up to heaven, stunned. Damn, I think, what in hell was that? It’s not like the pain of loving someone who doesn’t want you back (though that once ate up years of my life and left me blown like an artery after too many bypasses), nor does it compare to frittering away in a job that I’m ill-suited to and which I’ll probably lose. It’s more as if a hammer dropped from a sill and laid him out cold. That scaffold just appeared there overnight. And for all my hard-won bile I’m not worse off than he is, except in this: I’ve come to think I am.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

I smell me coming up behind me some days— sweet sarcophagal history. The Ark after the beasts disembarked, the motel bed as the maid draws the shades, shakes the sheets, blinks back the stink, the leafed hollow where the stalled mower sits in its exhaust and smells of wronged flesh, wing, meat but me mostly, climbing the steps, extract of me, stinking of me.

Dark by five, the day gives up and so do I, stalled at the top of the stairs I forget what for, adrift in a scrap of dream that’s not a dream exactly but a stupor, unrefined. I go astray in old routines, I dare myself to reconstruct the rules of old invented games—that one of throwing snowballs at the roof, to watch them shrink as they rolled down, spinning to their pits, to see the force that made them briefly a thing so neatly undone. Today an old friend’s tiny boy lobbied me to pitch some snowballs at him. I bowed to his dense little will. But planned to miss. As I packed and flung each one to its unpacking, he hunted down the humble bits and crumbs of every impact, as they ran from him along the icy slope, and gathered and carried them back to me at the top. Eating them as he came. So that’s how you get to the marrow of breakdown. I forgot. That you could put what’s left to your lips.

Does Chang feel his teeth falling out? One... two... three... His mouth shuts. How will he speak? Like the moon released at last and speechless, he has lost his descendants. Life splits— a rift, a cleft, the half- light between waking and sleeping. A quartz-colored dawn rescues him. The day clears. Dizzy waves rush to shore. The factory calls him to work, but even there, the gap-toothed partitions in the wall where the rice bowls are kept stay empty. It’s another sad round of layoffs. How many more will be lost? How many?