Coming to Age

by Carolyn Hopley

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,

  leaning in the doorway, talking to 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<
br />
  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?

  W. B. Yeats

  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—