181 Aging poems

“Feed Fred and sit with him and mind he doesn’t walk about. He falls. Tell him his ute is safe back home. Thinks someone’s pinched it, peers around the carpark all the time. His family brought him in it and he thinks it’s gone. He was a farmer once . . .” I take the tray. The ice-cream’s almost melted round the crumbled orange jelly and the soup’s too hot. I know I’ll have to blow on it. Hunched, trapped behind a tray, he glances sideways, face as brown and caverned as the land itself, long thin lips droop ironic at the corners, gaunt nose. The blue and white pajamas cage the restless rangy legs. In and out they go, the feet in cotton socks feeling for the ground. “Are you a foreigner?” “Not exactly. Just a little sunburnt,” and I put the jelly down. I musn’t feel a thing: my smile has come unstuck. I place a paper napkin on his lap. He winces. “You’re a foreigner all right,” he says. “OK,” I say. What’s one displacement more or less, wishing I were a hearty flat-faced Fenian with a perm and nothing doing in the belfry. Someone like his mother. Or a wife who spared him the sorrow of himself. Now he grabs the spoon. “I’ll do it.” “Right,” I say, “You go ahead. Just ask me if you want some help.” The tone’s not right. I watch the trembling progress of the spoon for what seems years, paralysed with pity for his pride. How does a dark-faced woman give a man called Fred who cropped a farm and drove a battered ute a meal of soup and jelly? Outside the window, clouds are swelling into growing darkness and there’s a man hard on his knees planting something in the rain.

Draped in towels, my grandmother sits in a hard-backed chair, a white bowl of soapy water on the floor. She lifts her frail arm, then rests it, gratefully, in her daughter’s palm. Gliding a wet washcloth, my mother’s hand becomes a cloud, and every bruise, a rain- drenched flower.

My only love sprung  from my only hate! — Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene v At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain of hamburger, and a tooth broke off  between my fingers. I felt nothing. The dentist said:The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here?

1. Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being. Even memory is a finger to my lips. Once I entered down the center aisle at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me. “Who is this master of her ninety nipples?” the public whispered. Now the ocean is my audience, I see in secret my last secret. 2. Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar I saw myself wearing it even into the deep, an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight, on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music this growing from flesh and bone into seashell: undulating salts become a purple mantle, and the almost translucent bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

In the sweet shire of Cardigan, Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall, An old Man dwells, a little man,— 'Tis said he once was tall. For five-and-thirty years he lived A running huntsman merry; And still the centre of his cheek Is red as a ripe cherry. No man like him the horn could sound, And hill and valley rang with glee When Echo bandied, round and round The halloo of Simon Lee. In those proud days, he little cared For husbandry or tillage; To blither tasks did Simon rouse The sleepers of the village. He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the chase was done, He reeled, and was stone-blind. And still there's something in the world At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out, He dearly loves their voices! But, oh the heavy change!—bereft Of health, strength, friends, and kindred, see! Old Simon to the world is left In liveried poverty. His Master's dead—and no one now Dwells in the Hall of Ivor; Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor. And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry. One prop he has, and only one, His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village Common. Beside their moss-grown hut of clay, Not twenty paces from the door, A scrap of land they have, but they Are poorest of the poor. This scrap of land he from the heath Enclosed when he was stronger; But what to them avails the land Which he can till no longer? Oft, working by her Husband's side, Ruth does what Simon cannot do; For she, with scanty cause for pride, Is stouter of the two. And, though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them, 'Tis little, very little—all That they can do between them. Few months of life has he in store As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell. My gentle Reader, I perceive, How patiently you've waited, And now I fear that you expect Some tale will be related. O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it. One summer-day I chanced to see This old Man doing all he could To unearth the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock tottered in his hand; So vain was his endeavour, That at the root of the old tree He might have worked for ever. "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool," to him I said; And at the word right gladly he Received my proffered aid. I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I severed, At which the poor old Man so long And vainly had endeavoured. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. —I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning.

Fifty was poignant, heavy pear departs the tree and the poem a sigh between branch and mulch. But no more. Another decade, I’m all song and scruff, the mind’s hot wire threading joint to joint. I’ll tell you straight out what I think, no sweetener. Nor has Aphrodite left me collapsed in a stairwell and don’t you father-flirt me, girl. This morning the world unbelts her robe, rose fleshed and randy. I like the rats that skitter under the subway’s hot rails. The little black dog who’s afraid of no one, not even the dope dealer’s pitbulls. Montaigne said sickness is God’s way of weaning us from life but I don’t think yet. I like the way soul clings to gristle like a newspaper wrapped around a light pole in a storm. Death’s a street away walking parallel and at my pace. He gets a nod.

am I not    olden olden olden it is unwanted. wanting, wanting am I not    broken stolen    common am I not crinkled cranky poison am I not glinty-eyed and frozen am I not    aged shaky    glazing am I not    hazy guarded    craven am I not    only stingy    little am I not    simple brittle    spitting was I not    over over    ridden? it is a long story will you be proud to be my version? it is unwritten. writing, writing am I not    ancient raging    patient am I not    able charming    stable was I not    building forming    braving was I not    ruling guiding    naming was I not    brazen crazy    chosen even the stones would do my bidding? it is a long story am I not proud to be your version? it is unspoken. speaking, speaking am I not    elder berry brandy are you not wine before you find me in your own beaker?

Older now, he is among us in diminished form, clothes sagging, hat large on the fine head He likes the largest stores             acres of socks and tuna             where high girders look down on him also                        who pushes his cart and leans on it a little . . . something sacramental about the belittling perspective          something heroic about the high shadows in the niches of the corrugated roof beneath which under spotlights that don't spread far he moves with the people who comb through the aisles               pulling down unwieldy batches of single things                   to last them through cold time that can't be trusted There he is at the far end of an avenue of obelisks of paper head cunningly mobile like a bird's                         eyes quick like one beading on flecks that might be the morsels that it needs or on grains                           or seeds At this its faltering morse of chirrups                     but no long address only the same few wordchains at my feet water water water millet beak millet crack millet air down danger aieeeeeeee

Here and there White hairs appear On my chest— Age seasons me Gives me zest— I am a sage In the making Sprinkled, shaking

An old man on Grace Street is going mad In a Canadian T-shirt he won’t change And red unwrinkling pants I thought had made Him stylish when I met him in the spring — Five or six times a day I see him walk Down Grace Street to St. Francis church, and knock And pull its wooden doors, always shocked That his entitled holy place is locked. Undreams Damascus from a baffled Paul, Rolls back the road where some unstricken Saul Rises up, as bubbles through a beer To a surface where we disappear And wake in some uncalendared forever, An unwelcome Elijah passing over.