American Poem of the Senior Citizenry
I. ARIZONA
The lungers stick together, as do
The arthritic, the lame, and those
Who are mysteriously whole.
Everyone protests his or her vigor
While comparing coughs and cures,
Telephone calls from successful children.
Immaculate cells litter the landscape
Where lizards breed and gods appeared
Out of the weatherless sky.
Immaculate lawns invoke the peace
Of pebbles, light posts, asphalt.
Even the ambulances are quiet.
If life repeats the same anecdote,
One must be thankful for blessed tedium.
Something else could happen, something
Headshaking, dizzy, abrupt.
Everyone celebrates birthdays with
The passion of partying children:
Another hot dog, feigned distress,
And that old singsong the wavering voices
Never want to let go.
I. FLORIDA
Steinberg,
the most garish philosophies prosper
In this place. Every other widow is
A cardsharping, Zionist diet-mystic.
The ones in between follow the stock
Market the way we rooted for
Young naked bodies are everywhere.
Tribes of them bow down before
The sun like new-age Mayans.
The corned beef though is good
And there is condoed culture:
Mozart in Miami, chess games
That placate eternity,
Lending libraries as eager to
Dispense murder mysteries as history.
This is no place to die-
And that is why we are all here.
Our resentments against our old lives
Dwindle mercifully. I no longer
Wake up wishing to choke that
Swindling two-timer, Sternblatt.
This is what America calls "'contemplative"'
Where you find the courage perhaps
To realize you never grasped what it was
You so diligently and lengthily did.
Red sails in the sunset, Steinberg,
And dividend checks in the mail.
Ill. FARM
Not many people know as much about
Silence as a farmwife does.
She has the quiet keys.
She could be a cat.
Solitary labor, Ralph used to call it.
He worked and worked, I worked and worked.
The children grew like trees.
How many times I looked out that kitchen
Window at games of ball, rain, a balky heifer.
It was all gone even as I looked,
And I understood that.
People fear the land.
They gather in cities, and they talk,
Always talking like on the damn tv.
This country doesn't know enough to shut up.
You can be too strong, of course, too silent,
But that's the earth's element.
It's empty here and it was
And I hope it always will be.
IV. THE HOME
Dosage charts phantasms of pain
The doctor from some foreign country
The teenage girls who take away the bed pans
One morning sure begins to look like another
The phenomenal cheerfulness
As relentless as the body
No summary will do
Playing hearts and bingo
Cheating scrupulously
The stages between life and death
As when a tree dies or a soul must
Make a perilous journey
Travelling through jello cathode tubes pills
Invisible to the workaday eye
Buttoning buttons very carefully
Weeping old-fashioned rich weeping
Over abandonments illusions
The mirth of such friendly strangers
Structure
89 lines · 17 stanzas