AMAZING GRAYS
                      or
Nostalgia’s But A Passing Fancy


I wonder if I'll ever reach an age
that I will not prefer to those before it.
Right now, at fifty-six, you’d think
that number must be drawing near.
My body is not what it was,
though hopefully not past revitalizing.
But should I manage that, become
more youthful, less concerned with
aching joints and catching breath on landings,
even look more like the younger man
I still expect to see at shaving-time,
it would not be from any wish
for turning counter-clockwise.

Not for anything would I
be twenty-five again.
Ah, Chapel Hill’s a fairer spot
than most, and grad school likewise,
but how it galls me to recall
how little then I knew
of how to love, or how my ignorance
would like a drunken motorboater
all my friends alarm approaching,
spreading wake of suffering behind!
Precious to me now are quiet waters,
oar-paced afternoons,
shoulder-ache the gauge
of just how far I’ve gone,
and most of all the trust
in loved ones’ eyes.

Thirty-nine was worth remembering,
proudly making mortgage payments,
changing diapers, relishing
the work for which I’d trained so many years.
And yet, for all the freshness
of its long-postponed beginnings,
that time was but a spindly seedling,
a promise, insubstantial, of the somedays
that have now been realized,
of marveling at children’s talents ripening,
souls grown wise beyond parental precept or example,
of savoring a labor that the pride and honor renders
of a tool by challenge burnished, in use shining.

What have I lost in aging, after all?
Youthful vigor, yes, but with it youthful
arrogance, self-consciousness, belief
that lust depends on physical perfection,
and wisdom is the enemy of passion.
Gone are my illusions of control, and of the need of it,
the fear of being wrong, of looking foolish.
Gone is that impatience,
greatest paradox of youth,
rushing by life’s sweetest moments,
trusting wit, but fearing truth.

An overripened age indeed he'd be,
for little suited but that long goodnight,
who'd mourn the loss of immaturity,
choose blindness over clarity of sight.