The young can’t understand the concept of time.
They get the way it opens like a flower, but they don’t
see when it’s reached the edge of itself. They don’t realize
when images no longer matter, when the anecdotes that
once seemed everything lurch out front, garish as puppets.
They still believe in profound summations. When you
grow old, you believe in punctuation, in the imposition
of the period, the twin headlights of the colon, the slight
stumble of the semicolon. You look across the floor
littered with nouns and verbs the way a mother
does at the end of the day. Nothing should go on
too long. This is why you sit down and apply the period.
You are not refusing but stopping, which is another thing.