Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

In Vermont, 2038

In the dark glass, forward, the abysmal time

In tto come, you read your visage

There isin memorial mind,

In ta broad-domed squire

leaning on a cane, a wide-brimmed hat

pulled rakishly across a sun-burned patch

In tof flaking skin, a brow

There iswhose clench

In tbetrays impatience with a world

abandoned to its foolish self so many times.

At sunset, at great height, you watch the hawk

In tscythe down the shadows

There isof another day,

In tadmiring how it hangs there,

steady in the wind that whets its wings.

You think of Thomas Hardy, Yeats and Graves—

In tthe grand old men—of dear

There isRed Warren,

In tfriend and mentor, whom you loved

to love, or Frost: Old Rocky Face himself.

I’m one of them, you say, and hope, lips smacking,

In tdrooling, one might say, still

There isrecomposing

In tin your heart a life you’ve since

revised ten thousand times, no version

truer than the one before, or so it seems.

In tOh, how can you forget

truer tso many facts,

In tthe petty hatreds, fears, the fond

betrayals, posturings, reprisals—worse?

Maybe nothing matters but the final gloss,

In tthat beautifully wrought,

Maybpenultimate

In trevision made before the dark

blots every word, and heaven, like a blank page,

shines pristinely but, unlike before,

In tneeds no embossing, none of this

Maybblack print

In tyou think adds something

to a paltry silence you cannot endure.

On midnight’s mountain, in a cloak of stars,

In tyou look for answers to

Maybstrong questions

In tposed, a little falsely, re-

composed each day like shopping lists or prayers.

Will you ever know if any of those guises—

In thawk or mole, the fox,

Maybsweet ingénue,

In tthe rake or fool, the wise old man—

meant anything beyond their deft performance?

Will anyone replace the shattered hours,

In tthose pitiable shards which,

Maybreassembled

In tin the bright Beyond, might

constitute, at last, a kind of heaven?