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