181 Aging poems

A birdbath ministers to the lawn chairs, all toppled: a recliner on its face, metal arms trying to push it up; an overturned rocker, curvature of the spine. Armchairs on their sides, webbing unraveled. One faces the flowers. A director's chair folded, as if prepared to be taken up.

I was young once, at least, if not beautiful. And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket. You are here; your name on a postal box; entrance into another place like vapor. No one knows you. No one speaks to you. All of their cocks stare down their pant legs at the ground. Their cunts are blind. They barely let you through the check-out line. Have a nice day. Plastic or paper? Are you origami? A paper folded swan, like the ones you made when you were ten? When you saw the constellations, lying on your back in the wet grass, the soapy pear blossoms drifting and wasting, and those stars, the burned out ones whose light was still coming in waves; your body was too slight. How could it hold such mass? Still on your lips the taste of something. All night you waited for morning, all morning for afternoon, all afternoon for night; and still the longing sings. Oh, paper bird with folded wings.

who line the corridors and sit silent in wheelchairs before the television with the volume off, whose cares are small and gray and infinite, time as ever to be faced    ... Methuselahs the nurses wash and dress without haste — none needed    ... this one has drunk from the poppy-cup and drowses in her world of  dream    ... Heliotrope, carnations, wakeful violets, and lilies in vases — masses of  flowers — wrap the urine-and-antiseptic air in lace    ... Please wake up; it is morning; robins whistle; the bees dance. Isn't this other one listening from her shell of  silence, and shouldn't she smile at the green return and dappled light through windows? As earth orbits the corridor clocks are wound    ... The last hour is a song or wound    ... Except in this corridor — mother's — where finity's brainless wind blows ash, and ash again blows through their cells: So much silence, so little to say in the end.)

We had so little, yet we had so much: Thunder and lightning at the lightest touch.

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out, my mother potters around her house. Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one there, no one to tell what to do, she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself, fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly throws out her arms and screams—high notes lying here and there on the carpets like bodies touched by a downed wire, she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she. I feel, now, that I do not know her, and for all my staring, I have not seen her —like the song she sang, when we were small, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die, for poor lonely people, like you, and like I

a slow thoughtful spontaneous poem I am 32 years old and finally I look my age, if not more. Is it a good face what’s no more a boy’s face? It seems fatter. And my hair, it’s stopped being curly. Is my nose big? The lips are the same. And the eyes, ah the eyes get better all the time. 32 and no wife, no baby; no baby hurts, but there’s lots of time. I don’t act silly any more. And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends: “You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.” They are not comfortable with me when I’m serious. Let them go to the Radio City Music Hall. 32; saw all of Europe, met millions of people; was great for some, terrible for others. I remember my 31st year when I cried: “To think I may have to go another 31 years!” I don’t feel that way this birthday. I feel I want to be wise with white hair in a tall library in a deep chair by a fireplace. Another year in which I stole nothing. 8 years now and haven’t stole a thing! I stopped stealing! But I still lie at times, and still am shameless yet ashamed when it comes to asking for money. 32 years old and four hard real funny sad bad wonderful books of poetry —the world owes me a million dollars. I think I had a pretty weird 32 years. And it weren’t up to me, none of it. No choice of two roads; if there were, I don’t doubt I’d have chosen both. I like to think chance had it I play the bell. The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration: “I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.” I love poetry because it makes me love and presents me life. And of all the fires that die in me, there’s one burns like the sun; it might not make day my personal life, my association with people, or my behavior toward society, but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.

Such were they, a dumb stuffed thing to say, if truth is we all grow old un- observed, limbs flail only halfway up a flight, where does dark begin settling my little bones. I dream and do love to have them, blue fish in a lake, my head more tipped up than down under damp earth. Some days others like deer from the shot, peeled back, how I find trees dressed in wild green light. The years come, unstitched a face, saddled as one would a heavy beast for walking. Likely I became then a member of heaven, put up, the years come and reaching their long wet hands.

We old dudes. We White shoes. We Golf ball. We Eat mall. We Soak teeth. We Palm Beach; We Vote red. We Soon dead.

1 In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling of beetles in a raspy bark. For now I am fleshed at smaller sports, and grow in time into the mineral thick fell of earth; Vermont hairy with violets, roses, lilies and like minions and darlings of the spring, meantime working wonders, rousing astonishments. And being a humble man, I at the same time acknowledge my miscreate: the nightshades, cabbages and fleaworts of my plot, though always I try to turn my back and scorn upon the inkhorn term and speak as is most commonly received with smile and wink and approbative nod, not overfine nor at the same time reckless of the phrase, nor ever ugly, turdy, tut-mouthed, but always joyous at the goosey brain, the woolpack of the solid cloud, a crowd, a heap, a troop, a plume of trees, grass, gulls and rabbits, in the end, no doubt, a vulgar prattle: but the planet swells and bulges and protrudes beyond my eyes’ aversions, and tottery, fuddled, always I give up, I am not understood, or wrongly, out of some general assumption of my innocence. 2 This much I wish to say, my nonesuch, nosegay native sweet, in someway plainer, this is my letter to you, and out of most severe purpose: the bee, the honey stalk, the whole keep of the house endanger me: the perspectives of the clapboard, the steep falls of the lawn, the razory apices of ridges, and the abdominous curves of the meadow into the far trees. There are ponds below the house, and water runs. The road crosses the water, and the road diminishes to the reach of the next farm, and the farm beyond that, and two miles bearing right or left somewhere runs Highway 25. I have found my way with difficulty, I am confused, halfway I have suffered a failure of vital powers, a swoon, have been smirked at by the natives, and misdirected. Fitting, for I always dream of the painless redemption, the return from fiasco and tumultuous journey to the transcendentally serene lawns of a transcendentally white house with columns of oak trees and iron deer and the affectionate greeting of One who has these many years waited in full patience, without complaint, for me to come in bleeding, dusty and deliquescent from the fields, the blade in my thigh, or blinded, the victim of fire or ravenous birds, the lovely blood on my cheek like tears, one-limbed, a bullet in my heart, my hands, my head cut off and the dark pulses of my blood diminishing. Yet never a reproach for my criminal self-negligence, my careless japeries and clumsy flounderings: instead, my brow is wiped, my wounds attended to, blood let, leeches applied: I heal, I grow strong, I can set forth again renewed, valiant, sturdy, full of high spirits, lively, gay, spruce in looks, a reveler, a merry prankster, dimpled in the cheek from smiling, perfect Pilgrim, fit for the chemistry of the Resurrection. Yet I am of wild and changeful moods. I am perhaps worthy of being stoned, sometimes. I lie hid and lurk in wait for the giggling girleries and leap out and shout and scatter them like chickens from the boot to the safe and flying four winds. I am easy and fluent in the telling of lies, and let it be said that I roar and sing scurrilous songs in base places, and shall no doubt for this little vain merriment find a sorrowful reckoning in the end. Still, my noises please me, and what this wretched poet overmuch desires, he easily believes. It is his conventional cowardice, it makes him immortally glad. But then he always grows morose (that is in his favor), he repents, lances his soul, thinks of the willows and the columned porch and the wind melliloquent about the chimneys, and you from where he sits now at the far end of this small porch of a Federal farmhouse in this very and summery Vermont. 3 I look down the pitches of the lawn: fireflies make small explosions among the grass stems, and I think that to walk down that slant of lawn to the black waters of the brook at the dark join of the cleft would be like dying, and that if I die I will never pardon time. I think my words will echo only in my own mind forever, to what purpose I do not know I see a firefly trapped inside the screen. I have no name for any of this; I know it clearly in the same way I know the dead cry of the starlings in the eaves, the smell of after rain, the warm air holding in the hollows of the roads. For this there is no name. The holding mind is likewise without name. That is the final thought, it is the disorder, the reason for all this. The clouds begin to reach up Blood Mountain, and I am sitting on a farmhouse porch, and there are trees, and it is late and I am dreaming that I dream I stare down into a fouled well and see the white legbones of a deer and the water’s surface matte with loose hair, the green stink welling and bellying from the fertile sump up and flowing outwards in a fountaining current of vines and melons and leaves and the knotgrass lawns blossoming with gilliflowers, shoulder-high, cloud-high, the sun finally smothering in grass, and then in the entire silence of this growth the grasses thickening, darkening, becoming clouds, reaching up from the ridges. And all night there is rain. I dream that when I awaken it is a shining milky day, four roosters are crowing in the yard and geese dabble in the green soft muds of the ditches. This is the literal surface, and for all the extravagance of what has gone before I now repent, and make an image: All of Vermont each night blazes with fireflies, the comet is a faint green phosphorescence to the North, the catalpas blossom and each noon the sunlight hardens, and the sky is a clear ground, and I can look from my open doorway into dry and fiery yards. You see, I draw back always, I cannot be understood.O I wud slepe all the swete darkemans, nor ever speke!