Tag Archives: age

On the edge of a forest.

poetry, , ,

LAY BACK THE DARKNESS

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night

without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

-Edward Hirsch

Isaac Levitan – Birches, Forest Edge

 

I Have Started to Say

death, poetry, time, ,

The last stanza of this poem brings to mind the advice to “Die before you die.” It has been attributed to Rumi and to C.S. Lewis, and I’ve heard Orthodox Christians echo the saying. St. Paul said, “I die daily,” and also, “I am crucified with Christ.” Whatever all these people meant, our final death we are definitely instructed to keep in mind, and as the poet says, “learn” something about it — though it’s not clear that he was numbering his days in the Christian fashion.

But it was the second stanza that caught my attention here, Larkin’s description of the disorienting effect of considering time and ageing. The images capture what I often feel.

I HAVE STARTED TO SAY

I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

All that’s left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt.

-Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, by Humphrey Ocean

 

The little old lady laughs.

art, poetry, women, , , ,
Portrait of an Old Woman, Nadezda Petrovic, 1909

TABLE TALK

The little old lady laughs like a little girl, going
On with the tale of this and that happy day.
Says the little old lady, “Oh, what times were they
When I fell in love without Grandmother’s knowing!”
The little old lady is a little rogue, showing
A malicious twinkle in the depths of her eyes.
How distinct the silver of her hair one descries
Against the caramel-tinted skin glowing.

The little old lady forgets how dull or shady
Life may be; and the wrinkles laugh over her face.
Sweet tremors through her blessed old body race:
And my dear looks at me and I look at my dear,
And we laugh, and we laugh . . . all the while we hear
The white history of the loves of the little old lady.

-Manuel Magallanes Moure (1878-1924) Chile
Translated by Muna Lee

The wide and luminous eye.

poetry, time, ,

IN POSITION

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven’t got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you’d think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller – well, it’s not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design –
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them – love,
your very life, should they need it – will not

and cannot come back; it wasn’t a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You’re alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what’s to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

-Lauris Dorothy Edmond (1924 – 2000)
New Zealand

Waikato River, New Zealand