Figuring Out Life While Aging
2016
In youth we come through our bodies as explorers
seeking and measuring,
astounded and disappointed
as we grow into ourselves.
In our long midlife, we travel our path,
forgetting and wandering,
sometimes grateful, mostly blindly seeking
the more we yearn for.
Now, our bodies re-astound us:
aching and refusing,
complaining and attacking,
reminding us of time.
2016
Threadbare, faded, ragged from its many unpackings,
each time, deposited in a different storage -
a teal woven curtain, worn meaningless,
hiding
nothing.
The building that contained it - gone.
the people who lived there - far away, most dead.
A memory of a memory of a memory luminous
once,
flaring again, as it crumbles.
2015 & still today!
I have a horror
hangover:
a surfeit of tv news dribbles
repeating
the images and words -
addictive
and numbing.
To look away, to change the channel,
I switch to a story of plotted
murder, where the killer
is named and blamed
and hunted and destroyed -
and it’s over!
When I can’t resist tv news glancing again,
the crowds are still
raging in the streets.
I almost wake as I lumber
lurching on sleep-stiff ankles
and return to my night-warmed bed.
In the east, out the window,
I watch the pine boughs shift
and sway and still and shift.
Resting on the next street’s roofs
a pale gold light bleeds upward
behind the narrowing pine,
at the window’s top,
the sky’s grey-white
hints at blue.
Snow -
enough to cover, not to shovel -
squeaks
under my feet.
Bitter cold
burns my cheeks.
Walking alone
is painful.
I raise my face
to the sun.
This terrible comfort
of missing you
woos, wounds
and pushes me,
painfully,
into a new time,
a new way of being.
Excavating our accumulated
structures, sorting
and letting go of what
is not mine is
surgery without sedation:
scars and healing.
On the day I wake,
still on my side but
stretching into
the centre of our bed,
I notice I no longer
listen
for kitchen sounds
or the key
opening the door.
Knowing I am attuned
to being alone
is the loss
that feels like a betrayal -
as though I have accepted
your absence.
Golden from the top of the pine
and later lighting the curving branch,
showing the dull green
of all the wet overcast days.
New Moon sickle
above the hydro wire
and sunlit bare branches,
waving in the wind.
Change comes.
A poem I wrote in mid 2022
I don’t know how to live
without the carapace
Of coupledom.
Flayed, raw now,
every drop of anger or disdain
burns;
every discovery of smooth deception
rams
into my gut.
I want a leather dress
that reaches my work boots
and a masked helmet
with psychic glasses
while I grow
thick scarred skin,
armour while I learn
how to walk alone.
I remember Christmas like
unevenly matched pearls
strung on carols and secular music
you hear only two weeks a year,
while dreaming
of a White Christmas, and a Silent Night
in frantic malls.
The tree, skipped this year,
some red berry branches and
the inherited Nativity set out,
a few remaining paper cards,
unheard phone calls replaced
by Facebook, texts and emails.
The multiple demands for donations
filling up inboxes.
The mass-made stockings with glitter names
mostly empty now. Gift cards for
those with unknown wishes,
And chocolate,
and chocolate, and
wine.
Turkey and cranberries, shortbread.
And family traditions and stories,
some joyful and some
hard to swallow - the absences and angers,
the reluctant visits,
the empty dining room chairs.
Church choirs carolling.
and Christmas albums on YouTube,
and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
and a Christmas-themed movie.
With eggnog.
And warm hugs before an early night.
Learning Living 