No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery to a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?
Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.
And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car
as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
Billy Collins
UNTITLED #51
No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seas,
no Penelope scouring the stalls with delicate glasses,
no practiced ecstasy from the tireless tenor, no sweets
and wine at no interval, no altos, no basses
and violins sobbing as one; no opera house,
no museum, no actual theatre, no civic center
—and what else? Only the huge doors of clouds
with the setting disc through which we leave and enter,
only the deafening parks with their jumping crowds,
and the thudding speakers. Only the Government
Buildings down by the wharf, and another cruise ship
big as the capital, all blue glass and cement.
No masterpieces in huge frames to worship.
On such banalities has life been spent
in brightness, and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue,
the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.
Derek Walcott
Like the preceding poem, this one opens with a series of negatives. They are contrasted with the “banalities,” the homely familiar sights and places in Saint Lucia, the Caribbean island where Walcott was born and trained as a painter. The poem’s conclusion is the result of a lifetime of travel and experience. If Walcott had never left the island, would he have felt the same way?
Penelope was the wife of Odysseus who remained faithful to him during his long absence.
OUT OF A DARK WOOD
Out of a dark wood we stumble, spirit-led,
Out of a grief find comfort in a grace of grief,
Sorrow that rounds the shape of blessings
As the painter’s brush, shadow or high-light, touched,
Rounds out the shape of fruit, the light of an eye,
Defines the nervous finger of a quiet hand,
sorrow, the shadow of our joy, bright memories,
Lifted and bound as in a child’s bouquet,
sorrow to leave all that we bless to-day,
To-day, mortal in time, in quality
formed not to stay—
So sorrow, bless us before we go away.
Janet Lewis
Lewis, who lived until almost a hundred, wrote this beautifully crafted poem in her nineties. Elegiac in tone, this is an ode to sorrow and how it mysteriously underlies and defines our pleasures.
9
“LATE RIPENESS”
This section begins with a poem by D. H. Lawrence in which a young man imagines what an ideal old age should be. Since Lawrence died at forty-four, he never got there himself; but we can be fairly certain that it would not have been as he had envisioned.
And would we, who are actually old, want it to be as he imagines? His romanticized, even clichéd, view of age as a ripened apple omits the tartness, the bite, the pith of the actual fruit. New experiences don’t stop with a certain birthday, nor are surprises limited to the young. And if losses are inevitable, the pleasures that remain may be intensified or replaced by others equally satisfying.
BEAUTIFUL OLD AGE
It ought to be lovely to be old
to be full of the peace that comes of experience
and wrinkled ripe fulfilment.
The wrinkled smile of completeness that follows a life
lived undaunted and unsoured with accepted lies
if people lived without accepting lies
they would ripen like apples, and be scented like pippins
in their old age.
Soothing, old people should be, like apples
when one is tired of love.
Fragrant like yellowing leaves, and dim with the soft
stillness and satisfaction of autumn.
And a girl should say:
It must be wonderful to live and grow old.
Look at my mother, how rich and still she is!—
And a young man should think: By Jove
my father has faced all weathers, but it’s been a life!
This poem is replete with prescriptive “shoulds.” We are told what old age ought to be. How close does it come to our own experience and/or desires?
GETTING OLDER
The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:
I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.
Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.
Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say
as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.
Elaine Feinstein
As we reach old age, we each begin to accumulate our own unique store of days “won from… darkness.”
HAND-ME-DOWNS
My love rests on the couch
in the sweater and bones of old age
I have stopped reading to look at him I take
his hand I am shawled in my own somewhat
wrinkled still serviceable skin
No one knows what to do with these
hand-me-downs love them I suppose
weren’t they worn in and out of
dignity by our mothers and
fathers even our children in
the grip of merciless genes will
wear these garments
may their old lovers greet and
touch them then in the bare light
of that last beauty
Grace Paley
OLD IS FOR BOOKS
A poet named Robert Browning eloped with a poetess named Elizabeth Barrett,
And since he had an independent income they lived in an Italian villa instead of a London garret.
He created quite a furor
With his elusive caesura.
He also created a youthful sage,
A certain Rabbi Ben Ezra, who urged people to hurry up and age.
This fledgling said, “Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be…”
I term him fledgling because such a statement, certes,
Could emanate only from a youngster in his thirties.
I have a friend named Ben Azzara, who is far from a fledgling;
Indeed, he is more like from the bottom of the sea of life a barnacled dredgling.
He tells me that as the years have slipped by
He has become utterly dependent on his wife because he has forgotten how to tie his tie.
He says he sleeps after luncheon instead of at night,
And he hates to face his shaving mirror because although his remaining hair is brown his mustache comes out red and his beard comes out white.
Furthermore, he says that last week he was stranded for thirty-six hours in his club
Because he couldn’t get out of the tub.
He says he was miserable, but when he reflected that the same thing probably eventually happened to Rabbi Ben Ezra
It relieved his mizra.
Ogden Nash
Nash seems unconvinced by the previous poem’s lofty sentiments.
RABBI BEN EZRA (EXCERPT)
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!”
Robert Browning
Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra was a medieval Jewish biblical scholar born in Spain. This excerpt is the most well-known part of a much longer poem, a meditation on his life and work.
UNTITLED
Though not occasioned
to mirror watching
I stopped
and saw delightedly
star streaks, grey lights
moving through my hair.
I was mother-reflection
then, my mother watching me
becoming old as she had not
lived to do.
I cannot know
what she would have felt
as age came on in silence,
but I dance elated on seeing
touches of silver
appearing unasked
but earned by living
as widely as I dare.
Kathian Poulton
GLASS
I’d have thought by now it would have stopped,
as anything sooner or later will stop, but still it happens
that when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in a mirror,
there’s a kind of concussion, a cringe; I look quickly away.
Lately, since my father died and I’ve come close to his age,
I sometimes see him first, and have to focus to find myself.
I’ve thought it’s that, my precious singularity being diluted,
but it’s harsher than that, crueler, the way, when I was young,
I believed how you looked was supposed to mean,
something graver, more substantial: I’d gaze at my poor face
and think, “It’s still not there.” Apparently I still do.
What isn’t there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less.
Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us?
All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we’re after is just a less abrasive regard:
not “It’s still not there,” but something like “Come in, be still.”
C. K. Williams
YOUTHFUL ELD
Young men dancing, and the old
Sporting I with joy behold;
But an old man gay and free
Dancing most I love to see;
Age and youth alike he shares,
For his heart belies his hairs.
Anacreon
(translated from the Greek by Thomas Stanley)
LATE RIPENESS
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from my people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.
For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.
We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.
Czeslaw Milosz
(translated from the Polish by Robert Hass and Czeslaw Milosz)
As of this writing, there are approximately 7,730,000,000 people alive in the world, all of them our contemporaries, experiencing the very same time under the sun and stars. This is the vision of “no division” that Milosz achieved in his old age and wished for all humankind.
RECONSIDERATION
I thought I’d give my face a gift—
A nip, a tuck, a little lift,
But then I thought how long it took
To give my face its weathered look,
The years it took to crease this brow;
And so I put it off for now.
I once was young. That tale’s been told.
But only lucky folk grow old.
Mary Ann Hoberman
A FACE, A CUP
The thousand hairline cracks in an aged face
match the hairline cracks in an aged cup
and come from similar insults: careless, base
self-absorbed gestures from a younger face,
cruel and fine. Bang! Each disturbed trace
deepens to a visible crack. A break-up,
a mix-up, a wild mistake: these show in a face
like the hairline cracks in an ancient cup.
Neither wholly broken nor all used up
the cup becomes a visage, unstable.
One never knows what will crack it open
and finish it. Banged too hard on a table?
Yet happiness might crack a face open
in a better way: as laugh lines
releasing the joys of ancient thoughts
cupped into use, and suddenly able.
Molly Peacock
Carrying this comparison throughout the poem, the poet arrives at an alternate interpretation of those “hairline cracks,” now evidence of old joys.
TERMINUS
It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There’s not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,—fault of novel germs,—
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
“Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You cannot control the winds but you can adjust the sails.” Here Emerson seems to flesh out this familiar adage by Anonymous, transforming it into a positive prescription for living that has sustained readers since its publication in 1867. A “baresark” is a berserker or Norse warrior who fought without armor.
MOTHER TO SON
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Langston Hughes
10
“GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR”
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of joy, quoted by Denise Levertov in her poem “Joy,” is on the face of it an oxymoron. How can joy and fear be related? There is something in the fleeting nature of joy, in its unexpectedness and evanescence, that makes it especially precious. It comes and goes without our bidding. Clutch at it and it will vanish. Therein lies the fear.