At a Poetry Reading

I sit in the crowded auditorium

listening to the old man read

poems he wrote thirty years ago.

In his face lifted

to the light

his eyes like large pools

of memory

shine a kind of fire

I have not seen

in a very long time.

When I am eighty years old,

will I be able to stand

with such power

arcing like lightning bolts

around my body?

Will I contain words that have meaning

beyond their first spoken breath?

As I, along with hundreds of others,

sigh at the poem’s last line,

his eyes hold the light a moment longer

and that’s when I see:

we could be a stand of pine trees in shadow,

blades of sedge on a dewy meadow,

hatch of mayflies over a slow-moving stream,

and he would still

stand that way

speak that way

his eyes would still

blaze that way.