181 Aging poems

I was just getting to that. But first, old age. If you could just let me finish. Once it was I who rudely interrupted proceedings: the chair rapped & called to order, but I seized from pending approval the minutes & ran off with the handsome mustachioed night watch. Matching wits we wound up jangling on a motel bureau in simultaneous alarm & ran down together to silence, Bide-a-Wee’s appointed guest in his sleep deceased so far from home he didn’t know a soul. A what? We heard Gideons rustling in the drawer, & as we rifled the fellow’s bags before we fled, & fled, his time flew too, from his cuffs &collars flapping ahead.

When from my counted days I think of times still owed to me by tyrant love, and my temples anticipate a frost beyond the tribulation of my years I see love’s counterfeit joys are a poison reason sips from a glass raised to those for whom hunger dare appear in the guise of my honeyed daydream. What potion of forgetting pleases reason that by neglect of its duty so toils against itself for satisfaction? But my affliction seeks solace, measure of the desire to be remedied and the desire to overcome it love’s remedy ……………………………………………………………… Cuando imagino de mis breves días los muchos que el tirano amor me debe y en mi cabello anticipar la nieve, más que en los años las tristezas mías, veo que son sus falsas alegrías veneno que en cristal la razón bebe por quien el apetito se le atreve vestido de mis dulces fantasías. ¿Qué hierbas del olvido ha dado el gusto a la razón, que sin hacer su oficio quiere contra razón satisfacelle? Mas consolarse quiere mi disgusto, que es el deseo del remedio indicio, y el remedio de amor, querer vencelle. [Lope de Vega, 1562—1635]

When I was fair and young, then favor graced me. Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more. How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe, How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show, But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy, Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy, I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast That neither night nor day I could take any rest. Wherefore I did repent that I had said before: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

more than the black which it displaces— Upon any fine day I jump these traces

children grown— dust accumulates on half the kitchen table

The planet turns there without you, beautiful. Exiled by death you cannot touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates lived out and discarded, something crowded inside us always craving to become something glistening outside us, the relentless planet showing itself the logic of what is buried inside it. To love existence is to love what is indifferent to you you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful. World that can know itself only by world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars. You are an hypothesis made of flesh. What you will teach the stars is constant rage at the constant prospect of not-being. • Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear a knock.Knock, Knock. Two knocks, quite clear. I wake and listen. It's nothing.

1 Sometime after I had entered that time of   life people prefer to allude to in others but not in themselves, in the middle of the night the phone rang. It rang and rang as though the world needed me, though really it was the reverse. I lay in bed, trying to analyze the ring. It had my mother’s persistence and my father’s pained embarrassment. When I picked it up, the line was dead. Or was the phone working and the caller dead? Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps? 2 My mother and father stood in the cold on the front steps. My mother stared at me, a daughter, a fellow female. You never think of us, she said. We read your books when they reach heaven. Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of  your sister. And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger, tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms. But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist. And your sister — you have your sister’s soul. After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries. 3 The street was white again, all the bushes covered with heavy snow and the trees glittering, encased with ice. I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end. It seemed the longest night I had ever known, longer than the night I was born. I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you. 4 Outside the street was silent. The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets, its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before. I left it as it was; its long cord drifting under the furniture. I watched the snow falling, not so much obscuring things as making them seem larger than they were. Who would call in the middle of the night? Trouble calls, despair calls. Joy is sleeping like a baby.

I What shall I do with this absurdity — O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible — No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly, Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back And had the livelong summer day to spend. It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend Until imagination, ear and eye, Can be content with argument and deal In abstract things; or be derided by A sort of battered kettle at the heel. II I pace upon the battlements and stare On the foundations of a house, or where

Lately, the weather aches; the air is short of breath, and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed. Day by day, the sun bores the sky, until the moon begins its tiresome disappearing act, making the oceans yawn. Even the seasons change with a throb of weariness— bud, bloom, leaf, fall. If it would help, I would paint my house silver or sell it or buy a red convertible. I would, but who am I to try to cheer up the self-indulgent universe.

The barroom mirror lit up with our wives has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills Japanese subcompact, little lives asleep behind us, heading for the hills in utter darkness through invisible countryside we know by heart by light; but woods that are humane and hospitable often turn eerie on a moonless night. Our talk is quiet: the week’s triumphs, failings, gossip, memories—but largely fears. In our brief repertoire of poses ailing’s primary, and more so with the years now every step seems haunted by the future, not only ours, but all that they will face: a stricter world, with scarceness for a teacher, bad air, bad water, no untrammeled space or so it seems to us, after the Fall, but for the young the world is always new. Maybe that’s what dates us worst of all and saves them: What we’ll miss they never knew. We’re old enough now to be old enough, to know what loss is—not just hair and breath; each has eyeballed reality by now: a rift, a failure, or a major death. They landed on us; we were not consulted, although our darkest yearnings aren’t so deep. Let’s tick off the short wish list of adulthood: sleep, honor, sleep, love, riches, sleep, and sleep . . . and camaraderie, that warms the blood, the mildest, most forgiving form of love. In an uncertain world a certain good is one who’ll laugh off what you’re leery of. That’s why we’re out here, racing with the clock through cold and darkness: so that, glass in hand, we’ll face our half-life, padded for the shock by a few old souls who understand. Now the odometer, uncompromising, shows all its nines’ tails hanging in the air. Now an entire row of moons is rising, rising, rising, risen—we are there: Total Maturity. The trick is how to amortize remorse, desire, and dread. Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now. The serious years are opening ahead.