Growing Old

I’m not the first man to lose his father
slowly, not the first to wonder
when I walk in the room if the…

Catherine Barnett on improv, misfit details, and the humor in elegy. 

When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother…

'Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills,'
Said that wild old wicked man
Who travels where God wills.
'Not to die on the straw at home,
Those hands to close the eyes,
That is all I ask, my dear,
From the old...

                                              I

What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that...

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals...

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,'...

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary...

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music...

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can’t come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books...

It should be easy, I tell my son,
to dispose of the possessions kept
in these rooms.

I’ve left some things on a shelf for him, see?
These coupons might still be valid,
the vinegar will keep forever.

I’ve always liked the idea of order.
I’ve always...

In springtime, chief of all seasons,
        in May when new joys rise and flourish,
                the sun is lord and messenger at once and sends down to us
        to rouse our bodies and be merry:
humankind to...

How many hours have I wasted
            trying to turn this into that, a rabbit
and a hat, a woman whose body

            can split into three separate pieces.
This is my idea of...

Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

out of character...

Her skin never wrinkled
And I used to wonder why

Her skin never wrinkled
As every year passed by

Look at Grandma's hands my mom would say
I bet you'd never think of how they stay that way

As she grew older
Her skin remained smooth and...

I swim my laps today, slowly, slowly,
reaching my arms out & over, my fleshly oars,
the water silken on my skin, my body still able
to be a body & resting at the pool’s lip,
I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how...

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The...

Theodore Enslin, poet of Maine, I am closing my eyes to tune you in,
to hear your tender buttons turning inside-out toward reflections
on water, attention to stones. Yet, even though you're using a microphone,
your voice—when it follows softly on the consonantal...

A body must remind itself
to keep living, continually,
throughout the day.

Even at night while sleeping,
proteins, either messenger, builder,
or destroyer, keeps busy

transforming itself or other substances.
Scientists call these reactions
—to change their innate structure,
dictated by DNA—cellular frustration,

a cotton-cloud nomenclature for crusade,
combat, warfare, aid,...