the sum so won.

for Terlyn who wont accept turning 50.

 

 

 

I heard the wind this morning.

Heard it right up against my door,

and I didn't disappoint. I heard it

just like a man my age is suppose

to hear it with effrontery and excess.

You enter,

brave with a shawl, hand it to

me. I know the smell of

"Youth Dew" like an iron rod,

wooden and human. Where you

use to run, now you walk to the

coffee with your totem markings;

that upright smile a Jacobean

slide-show, etched with stone.

Into the Demitasse saucer our

unscrupulousness on the pot marked

cloth. And since we blamed our wasted

days on the cold and madness

which twice is outside with Yeats,

inside is where the Dickinsonean

nights of love are editorialized.

Our winsome rides in chariots,

often horse drawn, our faces dripping off

like the drowned bees gradual yet adjacent.

On second thought, it wasn't the wind

I heard at all. Just an old woman

recalling how the young woman

could explode.

Reviews

[Mark]

As we age, we become a cumulative total of the sum of our years, becoming more complete as life marches on. So age is just a milemarker, along the great highway, that we call life. The longer our journey, the more we have to show for it. Nicely written!

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i like the "Dickinsonean/ nights of love are editorialzed"

cold, madness, growing old, fighting it...

the Yeats thing reminds me of Plath living in his old house...

is the age thing that bothers us so much? or we just don't like ourselves?

and the drowned bees, reminding me of the time Plath tried to drown herself, and how right before her death she got so stung by her own bees.

i remember 30...that was when i went through such trauma...but not 50...just kind of came and went, like i was resigned to it...and then 60 came and went.

well...we do become pot marked with life...but there is something to that...wisdom?

wonderful piece....
so many insights about life and aging...and you do it so well from another's perspective.

jacob