Around the slow fall of sun
onto the eyelid of the horizon,
I got out of my chair where I had been
reading some Stevens;
and I went for a short amble.
The blue was turning a pink
as delicate as rose quartz;
there were a few smoky tufts
of cloud in the hatless sky.
Oh, when you grow old you find
not much to say about things;
but it’s not as if you don’t notice.
When all the sunsets have detonated
and the young beauties have smacked the gobs,
what could delight an old man more than
a little brown bird dancing on a twig?
I was thinking of my dear friend Rob,
a man made robust by love,
and patient by illness;
he said to me the other day,
“I’m concerned about my neighbour’s boy;
now there’s a poor young lad of bitter parents
who has grown up feeling he was
a waste of innocence.”
I had no reply. It’s sad. But at the time
I felt like saying “he’ll get over it,”
like some kind of corporate culture slogan
touted in the electronic thoroughfares.
“But isn’t a life so much like
moving towards the trunk of a tree,”
I think, strolling towards the peppermint gum,
“getting in under its hall of greygreen panels,
sensing the life in the dim frayed
tapestry of its bark?”
We’re required to dream like a screenplay writer
and be as coldly practical as a jet pilot.
We can appreciate delicate beauty like of
a leaf rustling on an Arcadian path of Heaven,
as slight a disturbance as a hair in the mouth;
and there can be a roughness
as if our bodies were slung into
a mass grave.
It’s like an Olympic life, where the gross desires
are an open slather five lane athletics track
and the subtle, lasting soul of God
is a goat path in the mountains.
But once it has borne fruit,
there’s nothing to do but swallow.
I had said to Rob in reply, at last,
“we’re each given the plan of a building;
some have a cathedral to erect, some a hovel.
Some scarcely get to lay the foundations.
The World has done it, not his parents.
But if some sort of shelter
Is built, we have a comfortable
or uncomfortable camp site for a short time.
It can’t be helped.” (Oh but in age,
you go back to the start and place a one
in front of a string of noughts).
And by old age we have drawn
the wings of the house down
around our ears, and may find
if the rafters are not too burned,
a wholesome rug of sunlight
in the courtyard.
