181 Aging poems

Old Woman Nature naturally has a bag of bones tucked away somewhere. a whole room full of bones! A scattering of hair and cartilage bits in the woods. A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it. a shellmound a bone flake in a streambank. A purring cat, crunching the mouse head first, eating on down toward the tail-- The sweet old woman calmly gathering firewood in the moon . . . Don't be shocked, She's heating you some soup. VII, '81, Seeing Ichikawa Ennosuke in "Kurozuka"—"Demoness"— at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo

Many of my friends are alone and know too much to be happy though they still want to dive to the bottom of the green ocean and bring back a gold coin in their hand. A woman I know wakes in the late evening and talks to her late husband, the windows blank photographs. On the porch, my brother, hands in pockets, stares at the flowing stream. What’s wrong? Nothing. The cows stand in their own slow afternoons. The horses gather wild rose hips in the sun the way I longed for someone long ago. What was it like? The door opening and no one on either side.

Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma risen into native rock or the buried flow of old fires cooling in ocean beds. The damage has been memorized. Tool marks left by loose doubts dragged across a certainty. Tongues of river sediment slumped but still flickering in the eye. And how pale the surfaces are! From miles above what even to others is familiar, the erosion—tears that freeze and crack the heart, small habits a wind blasts against whatever’s exposed—seems apparent: all’s worn down, weathered, notched, seeping, yet eerily polished, as if at last defined. Your map of me? Let your pencil trace the old quarries and splintered outcrops, let it analyze the faults, describe their throes, let it reveal how the light is laid over them all.

Lone amid the café’s cheer, Sad of heart am I to-night; Dolefully I drink my beer, But no single line I write. There’s the wretched rent to pay, Yet I glower at pen and ink: Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray, It is later than you think! Hello! there’s a pregnant phrase. Bravo! let me write it down; Hold it with a hopeful gaze, Gauge it with a fretful frown; Tune it to my lyric lyre ... Ah! upon starvation’s brink, How the words are dark and dire: It is later than you think. Weigh them well .... Behold yon band, Students drinking by the door, Madly merry,bock in hand, Saucers stacked to mark their score. Get you gone, you jolly scamps; Let your parting glasses clink; Seek your long neglected lamps: It is later than you think. Look again: yon dainty blonde, All allure and golden grace, Oh so willing to respond Should you turn a smiling face. Play your part, poor pretty doll; Feast and frolic, pose and prink; There’s the Morgue to end it all, And it’s later than you think. Yon’s a playwright — mark his face, Puffed and purple, tense and tired; Pasha-like he holds his place, Hated, envied and admired. How you gobble life, my friend; Wine, and woman soft and pink! Well, each tether has its end: Sir, it’s later than you think. See yon living scarecrow pass With a wild and wolfish stare At each empty absinthe glass, As if he saw Heaven there. Poor damned wretch, to end your pain There is still the Greater Drink. Yonder waits the sanguine Seine ... It is later than you think. Lastly, you who read; aye, you Who this very line may scan: Think of all you planned to do ... Have you done the best you can? See! the tavern lights are low; Black’s the night, and how you shrink! God! and is it time to go? Ah! the clock is always slow; It is later than you think; Sadly later than you think; Far, far later than you think.

From child to youth; from youth to arduous man; From lethargy to fever of the heart; From faithful life to dream-dower'd days apart; From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;— Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she Accept her primal immortality,— The flesh resume its dust whence it began? O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life! O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath: That when the peace is garner'd in from strife, The work retriev'd, the will regenerate, This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!

Sunlight fades the storefront full of magazines. Month to month they boss us—the covers, they tell us that if we want to get happy & alluring (real happy, alluring sexually) we must for goddamn sure take up the breeding of Jack Russell terriers, or else dig ourselves a little backyard fishpond. Days of fish, days of dog, days of sex— in that order, necessarily. In the sun all the titles are trying to vanish—phrases like trout pond diluted, the 20-point sans serif, inked-red passion bleached now, apathetic, ghostly— words that want my attention like movers on the street lugging mirrors, a moment when I seem to come toward myself & then I’m gone too. I am not a greedy man. All I want is to be a visitor to this life.

She lived there for years in a small space in a high rise that saw her winter years dawn. When the past became larger than her present, she would call and thank us for cards we gave her when we were small; for Christmas, Mother's Day, her birthday, our devotion scrawled amidst depictions of crooked hearts and lopsided lilies. She would write out new ones, and we found them everywhere—unsent; in perfect cursive she wished us joy, chains of x's and o's circling her signature. And when her time alone was over, the space emptied of all but sunshine, dust, and a cross nailed above her door, those cards held for us a bitter peace; they had finally been delivered.

“If it comes to that,” he said, “there’ll be no preventing it.” He uttered it as I listened. Had I got it right, hearing him? “If it comes to that,” is what he said, and, as if talking to himself, went on about how there’d be no preventing it. He came to that conclusion, saying it in a slow way of coming to that, whatever that was it might come to before not being prevented—and as if such a thing were for him the unthinkable, and would prevail, if it came to that. And while listening more closely now to what he said, I realized if no one paid him heed, it would be as if he hadn’t said it—if it came to that—and would then not be prevented from falling to forces known to care little for what he said, even if they heard it, their being wily and forceful enough to make sure it would come to that.

I can’t get rid of useful things and nobody wants to pick them up, I keep forgetting where I lay my umbrella. I don’t leave footprints in the snow anymore, we haven’t had a war on domestic soil in so long I wonder if I still got it. Because once I had it. I heard about a boy who once tied a string to his brother, he tied his brother to the ocean and the ocean to the blackbird— from the ground all the birds look like blackbirds from the ground a Stealth Bomber looks like a spaceship. The aliens are coming, they walk through birthday parties and basically go unnoticed. And this is kind of how I go through life, once I heated up a spoon in the microwave the fish have so much mercury in them they spark. I was handed a bayonet from the Civil War and a copper penny corroded with rust. When they take the Statue of Liberty apart to clean her her neck explodes with a million little spiders. Meanwhile in a forest somewhere someone cut open my grandmother’s belly and filled it with bricks something is coming soon I keep a bucket of lambs blood by the front door.

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday. This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close. We arrived when the days grew legs of night. Chocolates were offered. We ate latkes for hours to celebrate light and friends. We will keep going despite dark or a madman in a white house dream. Let’s talk about something else said the dog who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill: a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — it was impossible to make it through the tragedy without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words? Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan. It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl — I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters, and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying. These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans, or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers. It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others, or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising, with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash, hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.