Figuring Out Life While Aging
The photographs, strung like uneven pearls
across the years, challenge our memories,
declaring our connections, chosen moments posed
on cusps we didn’t recognize, and only now
see
https://soundcloud.com/joanvinallcox/familhyreunion
https://soundcloud.com/joanvinallcox/familhyreunionhttps://soundcloud.com/joanvinallcox/familhyreunion
I’m shedding my thesis library quite deliberately. I won’t be reading any of them again. That part of my life is over. I sat and pulled off all the very many markers I’d added to these books, while reading almost nothing of what the makers had indicated was important to me, years ago. While doing so, it occurred to me that reading has been my life art. I read for solace. I read for information. I read for concepts and thought maps to help me understand my life. Why is reading not thought of as an art? Look what I did to one of the many, many books that fed me!
I dove into books and swam through the ideas and language, then rewove my mind experience with memories of my experiences and into future understandings and behaviour. I created, not just a Ph.D. Thesis, but experiences in the classroom for me and for the students. I learned. I grew. My perceptions became more intricate and detailed. I read more, and grew more. This has been the great joy in my life.
The dismal days of. December
Cloud my heart with cold thoughts.
Death is expected,
Despite the decorations.
I hear the calls for kindnesses:
I watch the lights appear.
Versions from the old story
Are sung in greedy descants.
Where can I find warmth
In this place of palaces,
Jewels, and feasts?
Where is my heart’s stable?
As the leaves whip downward
In the wind and rain,
So autumn advances toward an unavoidable
Bleakness.
Still, laughter erupts and points
To the beauty now.
***
Crossposted at joanvinallcox.ca
Beauty Everywhere- on the Streetcar
The older woman smiles at a baby;
the mother in a hijab smiles back.
The man with a tattoo sleeve
thanks the driver for his transfer.
The proper older lady in her white-trimmed navy blue dress
is gently guided by a dreadlocked younger woman.
The woman in the seat ahead
wears a butterfly-print shirt.
The teen in his black hoodie stands and gestures
the young mother into his seat.
Beauty everywhere.
***
Beauty Everywhere – on the Sidewalk
The young woman in ripped jeans walks
her bike through the intersection
Inside the coffeeshop an older man stops
reading to talk to a kid.
A woman in Tibetan dress walks
with a boy wearing a Spiderman Tee.
A little girl wearing a red polka-dot dress
waves at a streetcar driver.
A woman uses her phone to capture
a front yard flower for Instagram.
Beauty everywhere.
When obligations collide, my heart unfolds.
I try to read what is written for tomorrow
without my glasses. I must decide.
This slippery road leads me into strange spaces.
The centre collapses unexpectedly, but the periphery
may knit into a new street view. I search.
Steering blindly by what is yet hidden
I try to avoid the road rages of others
and drive cleanly into the mystery.
In this dark morning, I navigate
By electric green numbers
And red dots announcing
Civilization – but unaware, sleeping,
Perhaps more than vulnerable,
Lost, fearfully grasping poisonous
Barbarisms, eyes closed
To the common good.
The weight of undiscovered dreams
in my belly
shifts and
the clock that isn’t there
lights up.
Outside of hope
or fear
or understanding,
the orphan
Is restless.
The blanket,
now too heavy,
covers the blurry force of
a kind of morning.
A friend of my youth has died, and another is probably dying. Microcosm. The world is in a perilous state. Macrocosm.
What is anger?
The conflicting stories
and silences?
The moments blocked?
What is anger?
The empty spaces
where I turn away,
wanting?
What is anger?
Is it this anticipation of loss:
the burnt-out remnants
of old miseries?
***
What is grief? Stumbling by haunted spaces
and turning away from your empty chair?
What is grief? The evening silences scratching
the scabs of your amputation from me?
Sackcloth and ashes pool behind my empty eyes
imprinting memories where your smile fades
Where is the garden you have abandoned?
What song is playing as you pull away?
Bleakly I walk and walk on muddied paths.
My stories now lost; their endings destroyed.
All sunsets are grey; all voices not yours.
There’s nothing I want and nowhere to be.
Then comes my scalding tears in their scarring tracks:
a slow stinging that solaces me in this deadened time.
Learning Living 