Big vehicle
grinding by 
on the street

Unfamiliar racket
brings me to my feet
to see

a truck
delivering worn furniture
to a neighboring apartment 

that a week ago was emptied
just as early 
with just as much noise

I’ve become
a senior settler here
I never thought

I’d make it 
this long
Never thought I’d have to

Expected to be 
elsewhere
Or at least not make it

as far as “senior”
here in this part of town
where old timers have typically

stared out their windows
and wondered
when everything quiet

and familiar shifted
toward racket and fear
without their permission

Does this mean
it’s time to die off?
I never thought

I’d be asking this question
while looking out
of this particular window

The thing I thought about
for hours turned out to be

in the place I thought I’d left it
when I at last got up out of bed to check.

In fact it was in the place I have always
stored it, which I knew again

when I went there first in my hunt
out of sheer luck or some sense memory

and there it was as it always is,
except when I worry

about it being elsewhere. 
Maybe it travels on my insomnia,

riding my anxiety to see all the places
I have never left it, then rushes back home

when I stagger out of bed to search; now
I can’t remember what it’s called other than

the thing I thought about for hours that isn’t
where I left it until it is. A silly thing

to be crying about,
whatever it is.

At sixty-three I ought not to care
as much as I sometimes do 
about what people think

I mostly don’t except for
how much fear I carry
about how much I’ve begun to forget
about the past and
what’s back there that people
might not find palatable
or forgivable and here I am

at sixty-three and I’m fretting
about how I shouldn’t care
if I’ve been forgiven for things
I don’t recall doing and offenses
I don’t recall giving

why are the old days considered
the best days when people I know
from the old days won’t
bother with me and here I am

at sixty-three forcing myself
to walk down these old paths
mostly overgrown and invisible
as if something said don’t go there 
to everyone including me and
I neither listen nor care except

for the fear that I lost something
down one of them and somewhere 
down one of them is a person
I don’t recall having met
who will look at me and say 
you dropped this and I’ve
been holding it for you

and at sixty-three
it will not be
a good thing to have
to take and hold

Most loyalty will turn out
to have been misplaced.

The edge is always
closer than you thought.

The drop is usually 
not as long as you’d feared

although you’ll still
be broken at the bottom. 

Aging reveals itself
as a series of once scoffed-at

anticipations coming slowly
to fruition; eventually

you accept that all you feared
will be coming true. Hope

is more or less fleeting,
though no less satisfying

for being fulfilled
only briefly. As for

peace and love and harmony:
save them for a song. Save the song

to be played by others
at your funeral. At least

joy will rise around you
and envelope those left behind.

If you want to do something
right in this life,

don’t let on that I’ve told you
this. Keep such lessons

to yourself and instead
write songs that suggest 

I’m wrong and it’s going
to be better for everyone else.

Mom asks,
who is Beyonce?

She’s a singer,
I tell her.

Would I
know anything she sings?

No, I don’t 
think so. 

Oh, okay then.
Goes back to dozing

in front of the game show
where she heard the name.

Beyonce was the answer to 
a question. That was

all she needed to know.
All is well. Enough.

Do you think you will ever
know when to say Enough?

To look out the window
and say Enough. To see the news

and say Enough.
To close your eyes

and say Oh, okay then,
plunging deeper into Enough.

You thought your life
was going to be deep,

imagined you’d have thoughts
as large as whales
moving sine-cosine through you
all night long, all day long,
from wake to sleep and after death.

You thought that at this age
bills would pay themselves, 

imagined you’d be soaring now
far above dirty and mundane,
that such small things would be beyond you
as you plunged and rose and plunged again
upon thermals, updrafts; flying upon the fullness
of cycles, the vast majesty of understanding All. 

You never doubted that by this age
throngs would look to you for wisdom,

imagined yourself in whale-speak 
sharing the meaning of tender, sharing the falcons’
long vision, imagined yourself
nodding at the seekers, shrugging when
needed to maintain mystery.

You thought this morning
about all that nonsense,

imagined yourself instead no longer hungry
and cold as you sat in your sad apartment.
The whales no longer passing through you
sine-cosine; you have no sky to fly,
nowhere to go. Deep thoughts
you once hoped for have left you adrift.

Instead you think about your empty shelves,
pretend you recall hearing songs in the ocean;
it seems so far from here
to the top of that last wave
but it’s really no farther now
than it has ever been: how simple it seems now:
shallow or deep, high or low, rich or poor,
hungry or sated:

sine, cosine;
cosine, sine…ah.

You live
between animals
in a studio apartment
pretending your daughter
is not so far away.

One side
of the room belongs to 
a dumb cat named Cat
who sleeps
for more hours in one day
than you usually muster
over two nights.

The other side of the room
belongs to an alarmingly smart dog
named Toby or Tsunami or
something else beginning
with a T you don’t care
to use or recall
as he never comes for it
which proves he’s smart
as there’s no need to answer
in a room this small. 

Your daughter
lives in New York
and neither calls nor
answers your calls.

You live
between animals
and look from time to time 
at the yellow wall phone
you can’t quite give up
for a mobile device. 

Feed the animals,
sit near the phone.
Don’t bother with the television.

If there’s ever a tsunami for real
they’ll never find you after.
The animals will survive
and go to shelters. 
Your daughter won’t bother 
trying to adopt either one.

You used to have a name,
but why bother with that now?
You were at last just
The Lady Between The Animals.
It’s not an easy one to forget,
but it will happen.

this body is fighting

i say die
it says no

keeps wanting

it says
no
eat instead
drink some water

it says
ask for 
kiss 
for fuck or

for the sake of argument
ask for life

for seeing it through
(aren’t you
curious?)

i say 
no

in the left side of my big dreams 
there was sunlit order.  in the right side
there was mist and if there was order
i couldn’t see it. why wait to find out 

if it in fact made sense in there? i did
well enough in the time i gave it to get
this far. i did well enough to put to rest
worry for the future: whatever is there

is beyond worry. in the left side
the steps up are straight and narrow
and i can turn around anytime i want.
in the right side i’m not sure if the previous

step remains intact. maybe i can’t go back
without falling into nothing. maybe that’s fine. 
and maybe the next step is missing. maybe
it’s all falling from here. maybe i’m falling now.

everything is a maybe 

to this body being asked
to die

except for one certainty

it keeps wanting

to spite the dreams 
it contains

my body
maintains left side order
maintains right side fog

all i do
between them

waiting