A Fine and Private Place

Why Old Men Are Grumpy

They ache from arthritis

And hurt from grief

They rue the end of success

Or they rue their failures

Impatience dogs every slow step

And halting withdrawal from the memory bank

They mourn each dying chum

And every dwindling day

Inflation depletes their fixed income

As they contemplate death

They pray for a good one

And curse the bad ones they have seen

Therefore they are grumpy

            I wrote this poem a few years ago, in the wake of the deaths of two old friends, yet I generally resist writing poems about aging, because we live in an unprecedented time when many prominent older poets, even in their eighties, are themselves writing poems about aging. Among the elderly but still often published poets are John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Jack Gilbert, W.S. Merwin, Marie Ponsot, and Adrienne Rich. They were born in the 1920’s and have been publishing for about half a century.

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            What’s in an age? Would it smell as rank by any other number? The only certainty about age is that the higher the number, the closer it brings you to the grave, that “fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace.” As Emily Dickinson might have written,

                       

I think about it every day

And wonder, when it’s come –

Th’exquisite moment that I turn

Entirely dumb –

If I shall know how I succumb,

Yet pray I’m not in pain.

Whether there’ll be resurrection,

I hear the word is “mum” –