In His Sixty-Fifth Year

FULLER 5 ROY FULLER IN HIS SIXTY-FIFTH YEAR The October of His Sixty-fifth Year With beak about as long and hinged as chopsticks, The starling stabbing among the chocolate whorls Is speckled like a specimen of quartz, Except the slanted settings for the eyes Which are as dark as those of belly-dancers. Strange that obsessive observation seems To be an overture to verse-as strange As wriggling food preceding avian art. Should old age act as though its missing teeth And fading sight were mere stage properties Irrelevant to its response to life Which ought to be as though demise were still As lightly contemplated as in youth? Ideal arrangement; rarely met, howeverLike that prescription of the Danish sage: 'It's a good thing for monarchs to be ugly.' Bird-brains somewhat exaggeratedly Counter the seasons' revolutions: man's Presumably perturbs them not at all. Not for them huge errors of intelligence Like Sorel's, who before the First World War Tried to ennoble violence, which he thought Was on the downgrade-to the detriment Of efficacious social struggle-though In fact a Time of Troubles loomed. Still here! 6 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Maniacs salute annihilating missiles And English-beetle nourished nightingales Winter among the zebras of Zaire. Getting His 2.5 Daimler Out A t Night In 1912 Rachmaninov complained About his motor's poor acceleration. . . Just such a desultory joky start I'd deprecate in other poets' art. Beyond the dark garden, garaged, is my ownAlmost , it seems, as ancient as Sergei Vasilyevich's-waiting doggedly, like some old patient on the National Health, For rare spares that will staunch her bleeding gears. The scuffed blue leather hugs my funny-bone; Her ton and a half through nearly fourteen years Has been a purring, savage part of me. I wonder if I'll scrap the rusting monster Before I die and buy an automobile More suited to my later modest style. Who cares? How right Karl Popper was to say: 'What makes a work of art significant Is something quite different from self-expression.' I can't take in the early winter sky, Seen as I go to unstable those yoked mares: Too much of it, too complex, too bizarre. Besides, one's mind is fixed on earthly things. And shivering. The artist still concerned About the acceleration of his car! 'It's hard to write a melody,' announced A critic in 77ie Times the other day: Rather belated witness in our age. The engine of Rachmaninov, for long FULLER 7 Imagined by others, too, to be a crock Still eats the years, not far behind the leaders. Is it the Way, that milky arch of lace, My dim eyes (born in 1912) enquire; Or a still cloud against the gulfs of space? Childhood in the Early Twentieth Century Even in careless hours Death's served up with our life: The memory of friends Now dead, and of their ends. -Except in our infancy, I was about to qualify, Then thought of former days When early death was rife. -Days of my own, indeed. So did I never play In perfect happiness, But set out my regiments Knowing their bloody fate; And kissed my widowed mother, Teased my surviving brother, Scared of some ghastly face Upstairs, on sheets of joy? 7976 Draws To a Close Youth happens only once. I mean, my dreams Were of us kissing; but being sixty-four— The age I really am-she as she was When first we met and fell in love-the world, 8 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW I knew, would be censorious to see A young girl wasted in an old man's arms. They seek a mate for George and if in vain He may well be the last one of his kindSub -species of the weird Galapagos Tortoise, already sixty years of age. Though reading on I'm reassured to find He's likely to clock up a hundred more. In the same issue of 77ie Times I see That dead at eighty-five, in Munich, on Tuesday, November thirtieth, is RaspSinister villain of the cinema Of Lang. I guess it was 1931 In a flea...