I got the housework done, did Monson prep and some editing, went to the grocery store, and finally, late afternoon, managed to fit in a walk. But all day long my eyes were bothering me: I probably need new glasses, and spring allergies aren't helping the matter. Between eyes and sinuses, my head is feeling a little fragile these days.

I'm trying to pace myself work-wise, though that's difficult, given how eye-dependent my jobs are. Still, gardening helps, walking helps, and once I get an eye exam things should improve.

The aging body is a tale of trickery and submission. How can we fool the body into functioning as it used to? When do we admit that it won't?

Canto

 

At the peak of my powers I felt a falling-off,

as if an internal organ had come loose from its moorings

and was bobbing gently against my pelvis like a pear.

 

The season was autumn. Threads of smoke

unwound from the chimneys. Every compass pointed

toward winter.

 

I walked out, in the dim afternoon, into the small streets,

through a modest wood, across a vast graveyard.

I read the headstones—

 

here, the woman recalled only as Mother,

here, Our Darling Ralph, his tiny stone tarnished with lichen.

My way was littered with parthenons and obelisks,

 

with strange marble tables and mossy

arks of the covenant, and among them

bulldogs rolled in wet pine needles, helmeted tots

 

wobbled on training wheels, and I,

no longer at the peak of my powers,

turned my ankle on a pebble and limped.

 

But when I came to the bottom of the hill,

into that clutter of merchant mausoleums

known as the Valley of the Kings,

 

I paused in my limping and looked up

into the watery leaf-light: pale gold, speckles of black,

thinned remnants of last night’s gale.

 

And I felt, for no reason at all, sweetened.

Around me, the stony edited lives—

born, married, fathered, earned, died—

 

seemed to swell into ballads.

Carved lions kneaded their claws,

and lost at sea was a cadence.

 

I was a poet, and I wanted to sing

of small Ralph, alive and perched on his father’s

broadcloth knee, in the November twilight, after the banks

 

had bolted their doors and the barges had docked.

Now a scatter of gulls sailed over the cove,

and Mother sat alone at her rosewood desk and wrote

 

Sky. Leaf.  Light. 

I wanted to sing that. And so I did.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]