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Sixty without a Crutch I love this world, but not for its answers. —Mary Oliver In the unnatural science of this age, Ask my dead mother Where the laughter went. If I could, I’d play cocktail piano till the clouds collapsed Into stars and the stars lined up As constellations, new ones with names like Rabbit in a Trap and Hercules Clubbing the Amish, There, low on the horizon, the spaces between them Dark and deep as amnesia. At my age, making sentences while the snow brings in Its undertaker’s chill, I’m prepared to be Appalled or amused by my elders In this sorry art, the mad and the randy— Lowell, that cod of serious weather, blown dizzy Around the pole; or Lawrence, his lungs like porridge, Dosing himself with the gray crystals of arsenic, Poison in the pipes, as if St. Sebastian Had been put to death by plumbers. The Age of Heroes has left the building, but left behind These trashy wars, the pride, the lies, Smoke drifting from one disaster to another. I keep telling myself it’s not so much 51 • • • The hate as the humility, But what can a small joke do Against the future? I don’t think my mind Has yet reached the late mammalian, still stuck Among the snaky lobes, neurons in their slither and hiss. It’s been so long since I’ve felt The drugged euphoria of August, Summer now as far away as a foreign country, Its only ambassador this ash In the firebox. I suffer the winter Like withdrawal symptoms. And I remember the wounds, Remember the day I walked through The torn field, here and there the snow like bandages, Soiled strips over the stripped soil. If I can still sing, at my age, it’s no more Than sepia laments in a minor key. Every breath in my sandpaper lungs Comes rasping out like mist on a looking glass, Ephemera of fog my finger moves through, writing Lines by which I see myself. And if the mirror makes a mistake, Who’s to blame? By instinct and error, I surprise the world until it’s gone from wrong to wry. • • • 52 ...

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