Tag: Aging

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Heroic Age

Those  who speak 
of aging as a curse
sense the days they eke 
out could get worse.

By habit they hallow 
victories of the young,
whose run becomes hollow
, soon enough unsung.

As bursts of sprint 
merge into marathon
they reinvent 
the measure of having won.

Speed yields to distance.
 The brio of dash
topples before persistence, which trumps flash.

And as they turn to lope, 
aiming to come in last,
this remains their hope: 
cross not sooner but fast.

***
I’ve tweaked this poem, written for the 2012 Olympics, shifting it from the somewhat maudlin first person to the third. To my present ear, it works better, though no one should have any illusion that these kinds of thoughts are likely to occur to anyone who has not himself begun to reinvent the measure of having won. In The Skin of Things.

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Once There Was a Thoroughfare

High in the Sierra the Interstate
cuts its own course above the dry creek bed,
its swerves matching the mountain sides
where math and matter marry to carve
the slopes I speed along, marvelling
at the mileage I make until, below,
I catch sight of a strip of buckled asphalt,
remnant of a turnpike no longer on the map.
This is how we age. Steep crests once
ground up laboriously in low gear are
blasted into empty air. One highway
replaces another. Weeds take root
in the cracks of the thoroughfare leading
nowhere. Above, traffic moves swiftly on.

***
Odd for me to realize that I wrote the first version almost thirty years ago, beating a retreat back to Canada on the I-5 somewhere near Mount Shasta.  An instance of what we might call senīlis praecox.