Figuring Out Life While Aging
I lived in libraries and classrooms,
More solitary among the living,
More alive in pages turning,
Building my armour and bridges.
The silence at home covered
Flattened noise; obscured dreams and
muffled resentments, darkened mirrors
Seeking to display projected images.
O, Boccaccio,
Where are you now?
I need you to take me away from
graphs and maps and the tv’s heavy breathing.
I flee the city but yearn for
its pleasures:
smiles, touches, and fearless
encounters.
I need absorbing stories
and happy endings.
I see the world
through a scrim of
books.
I ride on words woven together,
carrying more freight than
just solitary singles, side by side.
Sentences and paragraphs,
pages and chapters.
books – tap feelings and understandings,
echoing the fingers that tapped letters, words, pages –
and built, shaped my mind.
You, with warp and weft of words, created
this floating, flowing, close-woven
jewelled net-lace I ride on and pull
through the ring of my mind,
accepting joyfully your gifts.
Homes are ceremonial,
ripe with obscure patterns
absentmindedly repeated.
The Dining Room
where eating
is an uncomfortably full altar;
The Living Room
where family mementos and the tv
sacrifice lives;
Even the Kitchen,
recipeless and hurried,
has ghosts,
although its necessary
Partner, (for defecating and self-presentation),
tries to be polite.
So the young
flee and refuse the rituals
that triggered their fears,
So the older
submit to the comfort
of their ceremonies.
I’m decluttering.
Whatever shall I do with your treasures?
They hide
in front of me,
whispering how they worked
to shape who you were.
They distort
who I want to be,
cluttering my hopes
with their commands,
demanding I become
subject to their shaping.
Forgive me: I have accepted
only some of your gifts.
for Anthony The words I can’t say Swallow me up, Choke me, As I try to spit them out. They are my truth That I close my eyes to And deny, throttling me. My teeth clamped, My breathing rapid, I gag, Then speak And almost say What I need to hear So i can know What I know.
Late I came to love
what I’d lost,
fled from,
and clung to.
The cloud clotted sky
hangs over the autumn
fields – pale gold, green, and empty –
racing past
the life I built.
Finding the route
to my beginnings, buried
with only stone
stories, I grieve
my losses.
Summer-like open window
Distant hammers, distant highway:
Memories from an old photo album
Sometimes confusion or an unarmed feeling
explodes,
lit by words bursting
into meanings previously hidden in darkness and silence.
Rejoice:
a part of your brain has
new synopses
shaping your
Mind.
Pale birds, hopping, fluttering, flying –
Outside the window.
Inside,
People approach,
Hands together, bow –
Scarlet- robed Holy ones sit, nod.
One scarlet and gold draped chair
Waits.
The thangka paintings
Surround
The seated searchers.
Learning Living 