You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
Donald HallTags: aliens old-age aging other extraterrestrials antiquity
Chipmunks jump, and
greensnakes slither.
Rather burst than
not be with her.
Bluebirds fight, but
bears are stronger.
We've got fifty
years or longer.
Hoptoads hop, but
hogs are fatter.
Nothing else but
Us can matter.
Tags: love-poem incantation
Nothing I do will make death disappear
Or let your shudder or your knowledge go.
See the world whole, and see it clearly then,
A globe of dirt crusted with bones of men.
If we walk, we walk on graves.
- from "Shudder
Life is hell but death is worse.
- from "No Deposit
Death of a part is agony
- from "The Red Branch
Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations / Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains / As distant as the curving of the earth, / Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air.
-from "Love is Like Sounds
Exiled by death from people we have known,
We are reduced again by years, and try
To call them back and clothe the barren bone,
Not to admit that people ever die.
-from "Exile
The tree is burning on the autumn noon
That builds each year the leaf and bark again.
Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,
The rounding season will restore and mend.
Yet people are not mended, but go on,
Accumulating memory and love.
And so the wood we used to know is gone,
Because the years have taught us that we move.
We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,
To different Asias of our plundering.
And though we sorrow not to know again
A land or face we loved, yet we are king.
The young are never robbed of innocence
But given gold of love and memory.
We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,
And when we die are full of memory.
-from "September Ode
When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
'We were always,' he
said glancing down, 'a
fool two years ago.
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