The Years

Dawn Potter

            Dreamy as Tarzan, the years murmur

their old tune as we stride away from them

into our spotlit lives. Like fathers, they armor

themselves against loss, hawking phlegm

into coffee cans, scratching their scaly pates,

though a Nehi odor lingers in their cough,

faint as sour cream. Behind their rusty agate

stare slides a slow-rolling map of sloughed-

off days along the river. Scabby grapevines

grip the porch rails, courting light. A peahen

chitters in the weeds, and on the clothesline

the half-yellowed shirts of sweating men

sag like idle hands. The years hum our quavered names.

We clench our fists: panicked, ruthless, dumb, ashamed.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

***

Baron Wormser tells me that he is planning to use "The Years" as a prompt poem in a workshop, and I keep wondering exactly what his writing prompt will be. I know he'd tell me if I asked, but for the moment I'm enjoying the curious sensation of pretending that I'm an outside observer of my own poem. What would you take as a writing prompt from this sonnet? I am having trouble thinking of anything at all . . . mostly because all I can focus on is what prompted me to write it in the first place: reading Woolf's The Years, reading Ford's The Sportswriter, copying out all of Shakespeare's sonnets, remembering my great uncles sitting in the grass on a Pennsylvania hill in the twilight, meditatively spitting chaw juice into old dog-food cans. . . .