To Become a Permanent Thing
                     

In youth, the poet writes in the phantasmagoria of life,

since age is over the horizon, beyond the hills of living,

and all there is is the color and fantasy of the moment,

and the passion of its telling, and the love of its truth.

But in age, well past those luscious jungles of imagined touch,

there is memory in place of anticipation,

and anxiousness in place of welcomed expectation.

Much has already taken place ,

and the road one is on is all too familiar,

as opposed to that path, every turn of which was fresh,

as if there is now a treadmill of sameness

that holds each moment in a repetitive grind

and informs the heart of tomorrow’s gloss

on the ups and the downs that await.

There is no new flower, but a thousand old ones;

there is no grand anticipation, but a thousand de-ja vus,

wherein the jumbled pictures of youth

are mingled with the slow interregnums of age

and dreams are embraced as a way to make a voyage

back to the leaping, yelping times of youth.

Ah, the poetry of age and aging – it is bound to be,

especially in the hands of the ill equipped,

a sad and dilapidated architecture of words,

that sings the saddest songs so few will hear,

and fewer still would enjoy.

I picture old folks gathering around a large fire

in the woods, the flames casting dancing shadows,

and the group huddled in the camaraderie of age

all remembering the cascading tumult of their youth

and making a chorus to that looming past

that rises up in the smoke among the trees

as if it is duty to some oracle of faith

that all that went before is never lost,

but floats up with the smoke, and mingles with time and sky

to become a permanent thing.