181 Aging poems

My gentle friend! I hold no creed so false As that which dares to teach that we are born For battle only, and that in this life The soul, if it would burn with starlike power, Must needs forsooth be kindled by the sparks Struck from the shock of clashing human hearts. There is a wisdom that grows up in strife, And one—I like it best—that sits at home And learns its lessons of a thoughtful ease. So come! a lonely house awaits thee!—there Nor praise, nor blame shall reach us, save what love Of knowledge for itself shall wake at times In our own bosoms; come! and we will build A wall of quiet thought, and gentle books, Betwixt us and the hard and bitter world. Sometimes—for we need not be anchorites— A distant friend shall cheer us through the Post, Or some Gazette—of course no partisan— Shall bring us pleasant news of pleasant things; Then, twisted into graceful allumettes, Each ancient joke shall blaze with genuine flame To light our pipes and candles; but to wars, Whether of words or weapons, we shall be Deaf—so we twain shall pass away the time Ev’n as a pair of happy lovers, who, Alone, within some quiet garden-nook, With a clear night of stars above their heads, Just hear, betwixt their kisses and their talk, The tumult of a tempest rolling through A chain of neighboring mountains; they awhile Pause to admire a flash that only shows The smile upon their faces, but, full soon, Turn with a quick, glad impulse, and perhaps A conscious wile that brings them closer yet, To dally with their own fond hearts, and play With the sweet flowers that blossom at their feet.

There is a better thing, dear heart, Than youthful flush or girlish grace. There is the faith that never fails, The courage in the danger place, The duty seen, and duty done, The heart that yearns for all in need, The lady soul which could not stoop To selfish thought or lowly deed. All that we ever dreamed, dear wife, Seems drab and common by the truth, The sweet sad mellow things of life Are more than golden dreams of youth.

I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. I would like to find them. They are not on the greying paper of old books or chanted on obscure lips. They are not in the language of mermaids or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing. They run like torn threads along paving stones. They are cracked as the skull of an old man. They stir in the mirror at fifty, at eighty. My ear keeps trying to hear them but the seafront is cold. The tide moves in. They migrate like crows at a cricket ground. They knock at the door when I am out. I have done with craft. How can I front ghosts with cleverness, the slick glide of paradox and rhyme that transforms prejudice to brittle gems of seeming wisdom? Though I bury all I own or hold close though my skin outlives the trees though the lines fall shattering the stone I cannot catch them. They have the lilting accent of a house I saw but never entered. They are the sounds a child hears – the water, the afternoon, the sky. I watch them now trickling through the open mirror. Sometimes, but almost never we touch what we desire.

For what I did And did not do And do without In my old age Rue, not rage Against that night We go into, Sets me straight On what to do Before I die— Sit in the shade, Look at the sky

Oh down at the tavern the children are singing around their round table and around me still. Did you hear what it said? I only said how there is a pewter urn pinned to the tavern wall, as old as old is able to be and be there still. I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still. Across the room is a wreath made of a corpse’s hair, framed in glass on the wall, as old as old is able to be and be remembered still. Did you hear what it said? I only said how I want to be there and I would sing my songs with the liars and my lies with all the singers. And I would, and I would but it’s my hair in the hair wreath, my cup pinned to the tavern wall, my dusty face they sing beneath. Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said? I only said how I want to be there, Oh, down at the tavern where the prophets are singing around their round table until they are still.

An aging house, well yes he understands that—but suddenly down it falls. And he is in a garden. And there are animals. And he is in a garden and there are trees. And there are stones on fire. And, well, he walks up and down on them. But this is the Hebrew and, not a conjunction, merely some un- translatable particle. Cenotaph (there is no body here). (Somehow I can’t imagine digging a separate grave for the heart.) And everything is cast down—plants, animals, garden, stones, fire, Tyre with its river called Litany—along with himself. The living organism, he hears, is a symbol of the psyche. Thinking is inward seeing. So Wittgenstein thought, and also Swedenborg. Die, well yes he knows he has to, but thinks of it as being killed—or killing. As if at a distance—he lives, not in life, but across from it. And it comes to pass. And he tries to distinguish life and its contents. And they wheel around him, the cars, as if he were standing still.

When men are old, and their friends die, They are not so sad,

I used to like being young, and I still do, Because I think I still am. There are physical Objections to that thought, and yet what Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels. And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all: A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening To the music floating through my living room each night. It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began. You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore; The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart. Along the way the self that you were born with turns into The self that you created, but they come together at the end, United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story, Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego, Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing, Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors, And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age, As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs. In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan, Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn, A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live. It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything, And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care. It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe That flows around them and dissolves them in the end, But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark, A small backyard beneath a boring California sky. I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood, Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

no more the chicken and the egg come one of them before the other both be fadin (steady) from the supersafeway/a&p/giant circus uh-huh the pilgrim cornucopia it ain’ a pot to pee in much (these days) gas is gone and alka seltza runnin gas a close race outasight/you name it toilet paper halfway honest politicians there’s a shortage folks/please step right up

Thanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure watching my old house broken-beamed, grey elephant brought to its knees? White ash—gone the way of trilobites and horsehair fern, even the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze. Cueballs knock each other randomly; reverse. the tape and movement looks the same, illustrating the end of time: things happen, but don't matter. And if Lethe strips you like a swimmer from his trunks, where will "I" be? If Heaven without you is Hell, how will I know? A forever of no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart a cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light, the slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over.