181 Aging poems

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering ... Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

I read a Korean poem with the line “Today you are the youngest you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest I have been. Today we drink buckwheat tea. Today I have heat in my apartment. Today I think about the word chada in Korean. It means cold. It means to be filled with. It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn. Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin. My heart knocks on my skin. Someone said winter has broken his windows. The heat inside and the cold outside sent lightning across glass. Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today it fills with you. The window in my room is full of leaves ready to fall.Chada, you say.It’s tea. We drink. It is cold outside.

He sits beside his wife who takes the wheel. Clutching coupons, he wanders the aisles of Stop & Save.  There’s no place he must be, no clock to punch.  Sure, there are bass in the lake, a balsa model in the garage, the par-three back nine. But it’s not the same. Time the enemy then, the enemy now. As he points the remote at the screen or pauses at the window, staring into the neighbor’s fence but not really seeing it, he listens to his wife in the kitchen, more amazed than ever—how women seem to know what to do.  How, with their cycles and timers, their rolling boils and three-minute eggs, they wait for something to start.  Or stop.

Pattern or absence of pattern, the way a jet flies into blankness yet leaves a clear trail, I expect time to reveal an underdrawing, hatching of shadows, some rough plan visible through another spectrum of light. Once, at an ophthalmologist’s office, through an accident of mirrors, I saw the interior of my own eye, the retina’s veins like roots or a web, and then again ten years later, this time in an astronomy book—galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters of galaxies strung out strands of a cosmic web, the redness of that image, the light extending like roots 13 billion years in every direction. Michelangelo could see a figure in a block of stone, waiting to be freed. I want his vision when I look in a mirror, his mathematical principles for depicting space, his ability to translate three dimensions into stone. First I’m in two dimensions, a photograph glued to the glass; then three—I’m somewhere between the glass and the background. All my houses, friends come and gone. How would he sculpt me? How far out of the stone have I come?

It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.

I left here at eight And returned at 75. In between I largely wasted America. I married, had children, Distinguished myself in a profession Full of fools, becoming one myself, As is the way Of this (or, I suppose, of any other) world. I missed The Nobel but I did bring down The Pulitzer. The weather, The politics, the stars, And my own small contribution All lined up, and I got one. So “Pulitzer” became my middle name Before I came here, where no one cares A whit about such things. I failed at love. That’s where I truly fucked up. I couldn’t. The women in this town Are mostly severe, resentful —The men bitter, disappointed: A perfect place for my purposes. I stay in a room In the house of an old woman Who doesn’t want to have sex any more And neither do I So we do not Trouble each other on that front, Which is good. I do like to drink. I used to love to eat But then I don’t much Give a shit About any of that now. The old woman sometimes says wistfully God will soon be calling both of us Back home, but as an agnostic I don’t believe that. As an American, I don’t buy that. I came here to retire from love, To face my failure to love As I attempted to face everything Else before, and that Is exactly what I am doing and doing With the exactness I used to put into My work, for which I received the Pulitzer. I hate a coward. My son Came here the other day and asked Exactly when I might Be coming back And I sent him off without an answer. The answer Seems to be staying here, Staying honestly here and coming to terms With my greatest single failure. My wife is dead. To me, It seems I am left over To eat a shit sandwich. “Eat me,” the world says, Now that I have lost my appetite. We used to say, “Eat me” To each other in high school, Another thing from which no one Ever recovers. America likes to think Every one can recover from every thing, But about this, Especially, America is wrong.

Old and blind and in love with light, he’d reach for the hands of writers to guide him back to the landscape, once the subject of his photo- graphs. Often he’d see just how hard it was to render it right, and would feel free of such burdens. A last cloud on a lake he’d let carry him into night. Breaking sounds of autumn he’d leave a pond to compose, rustling the stream of images. The panicked flight of the hunted he’d let the dry grasses capture, their golden yield his release. Even in the crimson cusp of an evening he’d wedge himself, curling into a ball without twilight ever sinking him. The man swam with the fog and its very touch of resolve. Further than any writer his shadows lapped up the sand. All this in the ebb and flow of a ninth decade by the tide, an inlet mapped by its egress to the sky. And when moonlight would come to wash his window, a heavy tome floating lost worlds on his lap, often his other hand would read the apertures of old cameras, an author’s intent the subject of his alignments. But when the milky skies would dip the hand of a writer in the milky seas, to the light- house he’d ascend, dreaming of being a writer who was blind, tracing a horizon.

Her house is empty and her heart is old, And filled with shades and echoes that deceive No one save her, for still she tries to weave With blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold. Once all men’s arms rose up to her, ‘tis told, And hovered like white birds for her caress: A crown she could have had to bind each tress Of hair, and her sweet arms the Witches’ Gold. Her mirrors know her witnesses, for there She rose in dreams from other dreams that lent Her softness as she stood, crowned with soft hair. And with his bound heart and his young eyes bent And blind, he feels her presence like shed scent, Holding him body and life within its snare.

By the time he’d hit eighty, he was something out of Ovid, his long beak thin and hooked,

As I reach to close each book lying open on my desk, it leaps up to snap at my fingers. My legs won’t hold me, I must sit down. My fingers pain me where the thick leaves snapped together at my touch. All my life I’ve held books in my hands like children, carefully turning their pages and straightening out their creases. I use books almost apologetically. I believe I often think their thoughts for them. Reading, I never know where theirs leave off and mine begin. I am so much alone in the world, I can observe the stars or study the breeze, I can count the steps on a stair on the way up or down, and I can look at another human being and get a smile, knowing it is for the sake of politeness. Nothing must be said of estrangement among the human race and yet nothing is said at all because of that. But no book will help either. I stroke my desk, its wood so smooth, so patient and still. I set a typewriter on its surface and begin to type to tell myself my troubles. Against the evidence, I live by choice.