Getting There
"I grow old... I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled"
T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock"
These days I crave the comfort of
my bed, to lie, at last, at day's end in
coveted dark, and pull the bed sheets up,
blanketed from fortune's fabled knocks, and
the ill wind of seventy, spiriting away serenity.
These days I seek the comfort of scenarios
where the missing in action don their back-
packs and tread the war zone of my trenches.
Last night I rearranged, one by one,
bedrooms in an unfamiliar house in which
I appeared to be living. My sons in this script
are forever small and safe, stopped at an age
where I am still culpable, and a husband
on sabbatical from the spirit world stretches
contentedly from a bed I've just moved.
I'm arranging dining-room furnishings there
for dinner with guests 'en plein chambre
at our massive table from Mexico, its trestle legs
still sturdy through time, and six delicate chairs,
seriously old, bought in Belgium in one life
or another, each of their hundred years shining
more beautiful, beams by fine design bearing
up. For us, formed of less durable stuff, our hour-
glass set upside down, the past is a runaway
stallion we hope to lasso in our dreams.
for Daver
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