181 Aging poems

How did I get so old, I wonder, contemplating my 67th birthday. Dyslexia smiles: I’m 76 in fact. There are places where at 60 they start counting backwards; in Japan they start again from one. But the numbers hardly matter. It’s the physics of acceleration I mind, the way time speeds up as if it hasn’t guessed the destination— where look! I see my mother and father bearing a cake, waiting for me at the starting line.

On my way, I come upon them— A gathering of old women Soaking their cracked, graying skin, Their thick bodies sprawling voluptuously: Knees bent, Curving out of the water, Heads thrown back in a tangle of vines and leaves. I pause a moment, Waiting to hear their voices echoing with years, Telling me what I need to know, But the sun has made them sleepy and secretive; I hear only their whispered laughter. They do not trust me; I am not yet ready to listen.

I’m through! I’m through! she says and resays. The years pass. Her feathers gray. Her eggs lay themselves less frequently. The sky falls.

On the first warm day, the aides fret about his pate, fetch his hat. I push him out the automatic doors into the pallid sun. Dad thinks we should stay put until all the Indians are back in their tepees,

Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

I can’t go to the east village anymore because it is like going on a tour of my worst dates. I get older, my heart leaps at the sight of children who don’t belong to me, I pronounce everything like an Italian opera title. I used to listen to songs and have someone in mind for the you parts, now I just want to be where the light is intense, I want the kind of heat that kills you if you drive into it unprepared. This isn’t a metaphor for anything else. When I speak of the light, I mean the light. I go to church and sing along and feel just as moved as if my faith were blind. When I speak of the blind, I mean the light. Truly the only things Lindsay Lohan and I have in common are our preoccupations with fame and weight loss, and yet I recognize a kinship there, as if those two things mattered more than anything. When I speak of the darkness, I mean this living. In a restaurant called Caracas, I once spent fifteen minutes arguing about an Ayn Rand book because every time he said Anthem I thought he meant We the Living and I said what dystopia, what about the woman, and he said what about the Home of the Infants and I said what Home of the Infants? What about loving a man so much you’ll sleep with another man in order to finance the first man’s tuberculosis treatment? Welcome to Russia, I said, and we were looking at each other and then not. I tried to picture Caracas, tried to leave him for elsewhere, a fever.

Given an old woman and given a barrow. I.e. the system old woman O and barrow B. The system is moving from the paved yard Y to the corner C, from the corner C to the Stone S, from the stone S to the forest F, from the forest F to the horizon H. The horizon H is the point where vision ends and memory begins. Nevertheless the system is moving at a constant velocity v, along a constant path, through a constant destiny, renewing its impulse and its meaning from within itself. A relatively independent system: in landscapes from horizon to horizon always just one old woman with a barrow. And thus we have, once and for all, that geodetic unit, the unit of travel there and back, the unit of autumn, the unit Our daily bread, the unit of wind and lowering sky, the unit of the distance home, the unit As we forgive them, the unit of nightfall, the unit of footsteps and dust, the unit of life-fulfillment Amen.

Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk. It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail. Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied. Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls. Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at. Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms. Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed. A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it. I had been asked for light before but never fire. Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device. Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives. Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods. This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it. We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

She mops a washcloth down his spine and scrubs until his bones glow with the inner light of porcelain and when his Haloed hair bursts forth into foam he holds his nose and dunks beneath the soapy gloom ears flooding with signals the pipes transmit like microphones. The boy can hear another city, the one below where wind coils when it isn’t howling, one can hear Purgatory boil up through the manholes, a river flushing souls into the underworld, tomorrow’s news bawled at the crossroad of subway and sewer. If he were accidentally to swallow here the water would taste like silver off a dead man’s eyes. Upstairs, the mute émigré waitress he secretly adores sings naked in the shower, the newlyweds from Mexico rage about dinero, next door a newborn wails like a Black Maria, while in a hidden room, a crazy old man won’t stop repeating “the goddamn, the goddman!” And the boy comes up for air, eyes burning, rinsed hair silky, his hands wrinkled,Busha says, as prunes. Overhead, the bare bulb fogs with steam. She jerks the plug, the drain gulps a vortex of gray bathwater. It’s time to rinse before it sucks him down, to stand calf-deep, lacquered with Ivory, smoldering before a faucet that trickles a cool stream at which Busha washes him first gently in front and then behind in a way that no one else will ever wash him. The moon, too, must be fogged above misted lamps that bleed into reflections on the marbled pane. He swipes abstractions in the sweat, finger painting night while Busha towels his hair as if reviving a drowned sailor the sea has graciously returned. Don’t worry,Busha, your grandson is clean for Saturday night: ears, navel, nails, inspected, teeth unstained, cleansed as baptism leaves the soul, pure enough to sleep— as you instruct him—with the angels, cleaner than he’ll ever be again.