The Young Poets Tell Me I'm Old
The young poets tell me I'm old.
The old poets tell me I'm young.
Is it done, then, the work, time to let the sun go down?
Evaporate? Scatter my ashes among the stars
and out wait the eras to shine again?
Or is there still enough within me to immolate,
Take a firefly like the heater of a cigarette
and kiss the fuses of the supernovas, the wicks
of the unlit candles? I don't feel dead
though I try my extinction on several times a day
to see if it fits yet, if I've grown my way into it.
What the river gives up in speed, in flashing
down the heights of its sharp-edged peaks,
its supple effervescence, it more than makes up for
in the mass and the depth of its movement.
Yesterday, a snowflake on a furnace. Today
an encyclopedic glacier greased by its own melting
all the way to the sea. Yesterday, bright vacancy.
Today, dark abundance. And the days and the nights,
this keyboard at my fingertips, the blacks and the whites
of these eighty-eights, is it time to stop playing
and bury it like the spinal column of unknown fossil?
The only pillar of the temple I could never tell
if I were building up or tearing down. Time now
a waterclock of ice, and frost on the garden?
When the wine is asleep in a dark cellar,
what does it dream? Does it remember
the bitter, green grapes, or the headiness of the red?
Does the watershed recall the fountain giddy with birds
or is the goblet empty, the hourglass left overturned,
the full-fledged sunlight dropped its flight feathers?
Assessment. My eyes are cracked like two year old
dry red oak. But they'll keep you warm in the winter.
I have a ten thousand dollar smile that always has
a little hook of compassionate irony in it, and my crowns
are aligned like the zodiacs of Etruscan kings,
but it's not out to catch anything, it's not baleen,
and it's never been a blue whale skimming krill.
Broke my nose, shattered my elbow, punctured my lungs,
splintered my instep, my right hand fractured and rewired
so many times it's a necklace of puka shells
and the knuckles have all been punched back
from the Himalayas into the Appalachians.
And my skin is a cuneiform of scars,
a Proto-Nostratic alphabet, a stone calendar
of Mayan glyphs, a stamped passport
to the external world, the used condom
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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