And all the near and far that eye can see
Each blade of grass signed with the mystery
Across whose face unchanging and everchanging pass
Summer and winter, day and night.
Great countenance of the unknown known
You have looked upon me all my days,
More loved than lover’s face,
More merciful than the heart, more wise
Than spoken word, unspoken theme
Simple as earth in whom we live and move.
Kathleen Raine
This poem stands in absolute contrast to the previous one. Here the natural world embraces us; we are an integral part of it. Is it possible in some way to hold both views?
PEBBLE
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
—Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye.
Zbigniew Herbert
(translated from the Polish by
Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)
DUST OF SNOW
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I rued.
Robert Frost
4
“BODY MY HOUSE”
We are incarnate beings, but unlike other beings, we are uniquely aware of our incarnation. And one of the most vexing puzzles of existence is the nature of the connection between our bodies and our minds. As we grow older, our bodies change; indeed they are the visible proof of our aging. Our physical abilities diminish as well. Yet inside we may feel that we are still ourselves, even a plurality of selves, from infancy through current age.
When illness attacks, the body can become an enemy or a battlefield on which a war is played out. But at the same time, frailty and illness can bring us to experience more deeply the intangible blessings of life: love, friendship, kindness. And our aging bodies may also bring this compensatory paradox: the more slowly we move in space, the more time we have to explore our immediate surroundings and our inner selves.
And if we are lucky, we can sometimes laugh at ourselves along the way.
QUESTION
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
May Swenson
LIVING IN THE BODY
Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.
Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly—better to leave it as it is.
Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.
Joyce Sutphen
SUNSET FROM THE WINDOW OF A RENTED SUMMER HOUSE
They skipped, our mothers, down the path to the sea. Through wild phlox, beach plums, prickly clusters of pasture rose. Our mothers were naked. Their backs. Their buttocks—we were shooed from the window. By our fathers, who took matters in hand. It was August. Foghorn, ferry, the forking cry of gulls. Pink froth bibbed the outgoing tide. Life-listers flit across sea-bleached shells. Our fathers were husbands who kissed their wives. We pressed our noses to the glass. We were still too young to see ourselves.
Diane Louie
HERE
Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face
how did this happen
well that’s who I wanted to be
at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration
that’s my old man across the yard
he’s talking to the meter reader
he’s telling him the world’s sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips
Grace Paley
LASTING
“Fish oils,” my doctor snorted, “and oily fish
are actually good for you. What’s actually wrong
for anyone your age are all those dishes
with thick sauce that we all pined for so long
as we were young and poor. Now we can afford
to order such things, just not to digest them;
we find what bills we’ve run up in the stored
plaque and fat cells of our next stress test.”
My own last test scored in the top 10 percent
of males in my age bracket. Which defies
all consequences or justice—I’ve spent
years shackled to my desk, saved from all exercise.
My dentist, next: “Your teeth seem quite good
for someone your age, better than we’d expect
with so few checkups or cleanings. Teeth should
repay you with more grief for such neglect”—
echoing how my mother always nagged,
“Brush a full 100 strokes,” and would jam
cod liver oil down our throats till we’d go gagging
off to flu-filled classrooms, crammed
with vegetables and vitamins. By now,
I’ve outlasted both parents whose plain food
and firm ordinance must have endowed
this heart’s touch muscle—weak still in gratitude.
W. D. Snodgrass
REFUSING AT FIFTY-TWO TO WRITE SONNETS
It came to him that he could nearly count
How many Octobers he had left to him
In increments of ten or, say, eleven
Thus: sixty-three, seventy-four, eighty-five.
He couldn’t see himself at ninety-six—
Humanity’s advances notwithstanding
In health-care, self-help, or new-age regimens—
What with his habits and family history,
The end he thought is nearer than you think.
The future, thus confined to its contingencies,
The present moment opens like a gift:
The balding month, the grey week, the blue morning,
The hour’s routine, the minute’s passing glance—
All seem like godsends now. And what to make of this?
At the end the word that comes to him is Thanks.
Thomas Lynch
Definition of a sonnet: a poem with fourteen lines.
A SONG
I thought no more was needed
Youth to prolong
Than dumb-bell and foil
To keep the body young.
O who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?
Though I have many words,
What woman’s satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?
O who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?
I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had;
I thought ’twould burn my body
Laid on the death-bed,
For who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?
Here the body and the heart are no longer synchronous. Maintaining a youthful body does not guarantee a loving heart; indeed, it may do just the opposite. Many of Yeats’s poems deal with sexual appetite in age as an essential spur to his poetic creation.
MRS RIP VAN WINKLE
I sank like a stone
Into the still, deep waters
of late middle age,
Aching from head to foot.
I took up food
And gave up exercise.
It did me good.
And while he slept,
I found some hobbies
for myself.
Painting. Seeing the sights
I’d always dreamed about:
The Leaning Tower.
The Pyramids.
The Taj Mahal.
I made a little watercolour
of them all.
But what was best,
What hands-down beat
the rest,
Was saying a none-too-fond
farewell to sex.
Until the day
I came home with this
drawing of Niagara
And he was sitting up in bed
rattling Viagra.
Carol Ann Duffy
MYTH
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question.
Why didn’t I recognize my mother?” “You gave the
wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what
made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.
“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women
too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what
you think.”
Muriel Rukeyser
MI ESTOMAGO (MY BELLY)
Naked and as if in silence
I approach my belly
it has gone on changing like summer
withdrawing from the sea
or like a dress that expands with the hours
My belly
is more than round
because when I sit down
it spreads like a brush fire
then,
I touch it to recall
all the things inside it:
salt and merriment
the fried eggs of winter breakfasts
the milk that strangled me in my youth
the Coca-Cola that stained my teeth
the nostalgia for the glass of wine
we discovered in La Isla
or french fries and olive oil
And as I remember
I feel it growing
and bowing down more and more ceremoniously to the ground
until it caresses my feet, my toes
that never could belong to a princess,
I rejoice
that my belly is as wide as Chepi’s old sombrero—
Chepi was my grandmother—
and I pamper it no end
when it complains or has bad dreams
from eating too much.
Midsummer, at seventy years of age,
this Sunday the seventh
my belly is still with me
and proudly goes parading along the shore
some say I am already old and ugly
that my breasts are entangled with my guts
but my belly is here at my side a good companion
and don’t say it’s made of fat
rather tender morsels of meat toasting in the sun.
Marjorie Agosín
(translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen)
LOSING MY TEETH
Last year a tooth dropped,
this year another one,
then six or seven went fast
and the falling is not going to stop.
All the rest are loose
and it will end when they are all gone.
I remember when I lost the first
I felt ashamed of the gap.
When two or three followed,
I worried about death.
When one is about to come loose,
I am anxious and fearful
since forked teeth are awkward with food,
and in dread I tilt my face to rinse my mouth.
Eventually it will abandon me and drop
just like a landslide.
But now the falling-out is old hat,
each tooth goes just like the others.
Fortunately I have about twenty left.
One by one they will go in order.
If one goes each year,
I have enough to last me two decades.
Actually it does not make much difference
if they go together or separately.
People say when teeth fall out
your life is fading.
I say life has its own end;
long life, short life, we all die,
with or without teeth.
They also say gaps scare
the people who see you.
I quote Zhuangzi’s story—
a tree and a wild goose each has its advantages,
and though silence is better than slurring my words,
and though I can’t chew, at least soft food tastes good
and I can sing out this poem
to surprise my wife and children.
Han Yu (translated from the Chinese by Kenneth O. Hanson)
When Han Yu wrote this poem in 803, he was thirty-six years old.
CANCER AND NOVA
The star exploding in the body;
The creeping thing, growing in the brain or the bone;
The hectic cannibal, the obscene mouth.
The mouths along the meridian sought him,
Soft as moths, many a moon and sun,
Until one
In a pale fleeing dream caught him.
Waking, he did not know himself undone,
Nor walking, smiling, reading that the news was good,
The star exploding in his blood.
Hyam Plutzik
Aging is accompanied by both frailty and disease. Frailty is usually gradual: we adjust and go on. Disease is o
ften different. By the time it reveals itself, it may be too late.
THE BURIAL OF THE OLD
The old, whose bodies encrust their lives,
die, and that is well.
They unhinder what has struggled in them.
The light, painfully loved, that narrowed
and darkened in their minds
becomes again the sky.
The young, who have looked on dying,
turn back to the world, grown strangely
alert to each other’s bodies.
Wendell Berry
5
“THE GRAND AND DAMAGING PARADE”
Of all the losses we sustain in life, the death of someone we love is the most painful. No preparation forearms us. Even when the death is anticipated or perhaps desired, as when it is preceded by debilitating illness or dementia, we can be overwhelmed by the utter finality of the break when it comes.
Elizabeth Bishop refers to “the art of losing” and archly lists a hierarchy of losses, beginning with door keys or a wasted hour, as if small privations can prepare us for great ones. But losing those we love to Dylan Thomas’s “good night” is in a category of its own. And by the time we are old, there is no way we will have escaped this experience.
Poets have treated the subject in various ways. In the past they wrote elegies, formal poems of mourning. Recently they have written in more personal terms to commemorate their losses. And while nothing can appease the first raw grief at a loved one’s death, in its aftermath, poetry may offer a unique kind of solace.
THINGS SHOULDN’T BE SO HARD
A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small—