Tag Archives: aging
Glad to see you
I know him by the one antler, the other lost to wear or injury, an experience I share, like the butterfly’s remaining wing, the dog’s three legs. I will die a crippled thing, no perfection left unblemished, no wholeness intact, no certainty unshaken, a poor creature and hobbled, but in such good company, me with […]
Spent hens
My old buff hen sits the nest as if still young, her plump red comb signaling fecundity she no longer possesses, being nine, or decidedly geriatric in woman years, her last viable ovum having gathered yolk and dropped sweetly into her infundibulum long ago, no fanfare, quietly adding albumen, spinning slowly down the tunnel of […]
A better telling of a better story
Squirrels snort spring though estral arteries, leaping the lengthening days, tails backlit by sun. Shall I care more for the latest manmade drama than their tussled play, their animal exuberance, the heated unions that will bring forth kits — naked, blind, burgeoning, beautiful — a better telling of a better story? Shall I bemoan my […]
Future Dog
Future Dog wags her tail in the passenger seat of Future Car, which can pull 3,500 pounds, the weight of Future Camper plus a buffer against the life we are leaving, my old cat dead and cremated, like her brother before; likewise my mother, like my father before; their ashes placed in Future Car for […]
Words escape me
through the latest perforation, this Swiss cheese, this colander, the hole punch of each passing day, the mute minutes in which my ability to name and thus constrain becomes ever more soluble. How readily they slip from my loosened grasp, scatter and gambol through meadows outside my purview, freed from the meaning I made them […]
Closed captioned
(pensive orchestration) I contemplate my life. (distant music; eerie, tentative) It is dark in here. What is this place? (music intensifies) I am born, wailing like I know what I’m in for. (Baby Elephant Walk) 10 pounds, 11 ounces. (baby crying) Colic for three months. (playful orchestration) I learn to talk, walk. Nothing goes really […]
Our lovely bones
I Dear Collarbone: No one blames you, least of all the ball still firmly in the socket because you gave and then held, a faultless fault line in my body’s aging architecture. II As a child, I quailed to learn I have a skeleton — that horror-movie staple — inside me. What to do? We […]
Synopsis
I I assemble the notebook of my mother’s dying: the specialists’ names, numbers, addresses. Diagnoses, prognoses, prescriptions. Explanations of every benefit we do not feel. We decline patient portals. For our convenience, they say, but we are not yet fools. We recognize the human hand washed by technology of our sticky anxiety, the obdurate, unanswerable […]
Sitting between my father’s ashes and my sleeping mother
I consider the difficulty of endings, the origin of parents, their lives before me, what repository holds their spent youth, whether it is the same that holds mine, that holds yours. Or will. Weren’t we, not knowing it, magnificent? Didn’t we dream? Weren’t we foolish, and pulsing with possibility? Flawed and earnest, didn’t we love? […]
From my cat, I catch contentment
Some strange grace arises from the hand buried in the soft fur of my cat’s purring belly and spreads up my arm to the rotator cuff again torn and mending poorly, through the hollow of my chest wherein beats raggedly the perplexed heart, down the depthless region of fulfilled and disappointed desire, into the […]
Meditatio Ephemera 