Figuring Out Life While Aging
In the silence of a broken tv old stories clamour. Without the noise of distant horrors and injustices, old and Intimate pains begin to throb. The distraction of the world’s tremors is lost and what has been forcefully swallowed regurgitates pushing out into this unsought silence. Is this a healing? Are these imprisoned stories releasing into a cleansing or into renewed nauseous festering. Is there meaning in the silence?
What’s left after the washing is put away and the dishes are done? What’s left after they all leave without waving goodbye? I close myself in the small room with my past struggles and accomplishments and reach for . . . What’s left after anger and desolation? What’s left is an old woman reaching out to find what’s left when she becomes invisible, unheralded, alone and waiting to find out who she will now become.
Deimatic behaviour or startle display[1] means any pattern of bluffing behaviour in an animal that lacks strong defences,” Wikipedia – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimatic_behaviour
The wounded other strikes me like a fearful ghost in deimatic display , bluffing poisonously. (My gramma taught me how to breathe in cold times) I close my mouth and breathe through my filtering nose - to clear the air.
Trying to see what you lost in the park across the road years ago - standing in front of sheer curtains looking through a window in the moonless foggy dark A spark flickers A shock shivers oh!
Dried roses carry dead hopes, painful beauty, and silence. Perfume and touch gone. Only colour remains, and darkens.
I dab on perfume before my Zoom meetings. I wear lipstick under my mask I hide my hair I try to recognize eyes.
The golden sky at dusk Behind barren black branches Seen from inside A warm home. Friends from life times Wearing age’s stories Eyes drenched with memories: A warm home.
The sullen morning light, the cloudy afternoons, the grey-whites of salted roads and dirty snow piles. The holiday lights removed, the newscaster’s COVID numbers, fogged glasses above serious masks, and black-coated distancing. I huddle indoors remembering summer’s colours and pre-COVID times, I am grateful for hope and my flowering window plants.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke – The Waking
I have learned to walk without a destination, except movement, grateful for the places unfurling before me. Where the twisting path ends, where I have gone my distance, is carefully limited now. I rest briefly then rise and continue alert for random beauty, walking forward till the destination we all encounter halts me.
The winter solstice wakes in grey light outlining the old pine. I step into red shoes, ready to froth and jitter preparing for the feast. The light reveals the snow-edged road. as rushing gatherers, masked and crowded, hurry towards Bethlehem. The dark lurks, in its shortening time, waiting with its unsought balm of a pause, and sleep.
Learning Living 