Throwing out unneeded Second Life/blog photos from my hard drive always turns up a few that I like and wish I had used in the original posts. These three still speak to me and remind me of other things.
***
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
--"Affirmation," by Donald Hall
***
***
Pool-hopping, says the younger cop,
Used to do it myself, as a kid.
I stare past the blur of uniform, across
the dimly-lit lawn: two plastic garden chairs bob
in the shallow end -- drawn close, conversant.
All night I've listened to laughter,
to the sleek glissando of furtive swimmers.
I felt ridiculous, alone in the house, keyed
to every sound, finally phoning the cops
from inside a locked bathroom, then cruising
room to room like a watchful cat.
Now the porch light burns. The absent owner's cat
digs in his litter: each grain of sand flies
with the pitch and force of flung glass. Glass house;
invisible swimmers who scale six-foot fences.
They must be asleep by now, spooned
around each other, hair still damp on the sheets --
or maybe they've moved a few blocks down, lie seal-like
on the beach, dreaming, inches from the tide.
The pool's circulating pump sends water
over the edge, as I go barefoot on wet grass,
kneel and angle for the chairs. In water,
they're so heavy -- resistant as bodies. For a second
I even see hair billow out, as I haul the last one in,
I am that tired, that sick with desire.
--"House Sitter, 4 a.m.," by Julie Bruck
