CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
for G.S.B. of blessed memory
 
 
 
Handcuffed by time
I travel across this broad
beautiful America—
mesas, deserts,
peaks with clouds caught
upon them,
the Continental Divide,
where a drop of rain
must decide
whether to roll east or west
 
like all of us.
 
I speak to a group
of avid aging Californians
about daring to embrace
the second half of life.
 
The passions of the old
are deeper
than any wells
the young can plumb.
 
Meanwhile, you are dying
in a New York hospital—
your beautiful face drained
of blood
your arms too heavy
to seize the day,
your shining eyes
dimmed by pain
and drugs to dull it.
 
You have boycotted food,
yet all you can do is apologize
to your grieving children
for the trouble you cause
by dying.
 
“Don’t worry, I’m fine,”
you say, eternal mother.
 
Solitary as you will ever be,
our love cannot save you
from this last loneliness,
this last rocky sea voyage
where no one dresses for dinner.
 
. . .
 
Meanwhile
I am listening to a doctor
who claims we can all live
to be a hundred,
a hundred and twenty,
if only we expand
our arteries with exercise,
our genitals with sex,
our brains with crossword puzzles,
poems, and proverbs.
 
Wingless, we can fly
over death
if only the body
—that laggard—
consents.
 
I suppose that drop of rain decided
to roll west with the setting sun,
taking you along.
The Californian doctor is quoting
Victor Hugo now:
The eyes of the young show flame,
the eyes of the old, light.
 
More light, Doctor!
How can we accept
time’s jagged jaws
even as we are being eaten?
How can we endure
the extinguishing of eyes—
those mirroring all of mortality?
 
Doctor—
is death the aberration—
or is life?
 
As for love—
why is it never enough
to save us?