What we do we do
we do we do
this regeneration
it ain’t for the weak boned
this revision, life, revisited
the spring rain drains
into the sump pit and thus
beginning again
the water keeps running
and so do I
and so do I
and so do I
I do I do I do
This body wakes me at night, all silence and waiting.
After going to bed at a reasonable hour (I have been returned to the reasonable hours) not so much for the lack of things to do or the energy, but the absence of will to go further in the moment.
This is what a seed feels like, buried deep in cold dirt, right?
Last night I woke up around 2 in the morning, itchy-throated and coughing. These seasonal ills linger longer when the body has fewer requirements on it. This, I tell myself, is what a winterized steam pump feels like; the rusty bits itchy against air and metal and gear memory of energy turned into work. I must talk my brain out of steam engine metaphors. They drive me away from where the currents keep depositing me, demanding I make good. It’s easy to show bravado until it isn’t. Cast out into the world again at 52, a few years younger than when Confucius began his great (and last) 12 year journey.
I make myself get up so’s not to wake her up. Her days are still filled with the world while mine are flooding with words, gray hair, and an insistence that mocks wisdom. Drag, drag, drag the body, leftover from scattered winter sleep with the hope of a seed and faith in the love of her whose sleep I guard leaving the bed.
The morning will not be kind. I will have to choose how kind to be to it.
When I was 23 and read Auden for the first time, an older poet friend was surprised I liked him. “I think you have to be older to really appreciate him.” I reread “As I Walked Out One Evening” regularly and find different reasons to appreciate him. Before it was his sarcasm, the promise of salmon singing in the street. Now it’s the endurance. I think I might be old enough now to appreciate F. Scott Fitzgerald, the sad determination of boats beating back against the current.
[for George]
