Time to Go Context: The poem is dedicated to Beverley Fuchs, a dear friend who was also a member of a poetry group I belong to . She had recently written a charmingly optimistic poem about putting on earrings before going to meet her chemo therapist, so I knew that her health problem was a serious one and when she did not show up for our next meeting, I called her. She told me then that she was going into hospice and this would be the last time we could communicate. She added, าBut if you write another poem, would you email it to me? You know that both my husband Vic and I enjoy your poems. We hung up and I thought for a while about what kind of a poem I could send her. I also thought I want to go with her as far as I can. And then I wrote this poem:
Monday, December 15, 2008
TIME TO GO Dedicated to the Memory of Beverly Fuchs,
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Aging Game
Looking backward, I can see
twenty one was the age for me.
I could cast my vote, I could buy a drink,
I could say whatever I happened to think.
(I sounded a lot like a “parlor pink”.)
Problems were simply for solving;
worth any candles my flame.
Around ME the world was revolving
and all my tigers were tame.
I thought to myself, “What a game!”
But forty one brings a pall of gloom.
Sure, I can vote. God help me, for whom?
I can think and drink, but I fear to utter
words that could cost me my bread and butter.
(Even my brain is beginning to stutter.)
Problems resist resolving.
Candles melt in a flame.
The world I knew is dissolving.
I’ve learned that tigers can maim.
At forty one it’s not the same damn game!
Conclusions:
Now in my eighties I’ve entered, I’m told,
a “golden age”. In short, I’m old.
But fears for my future no longer daunt me,
guilt bearing ghosts are too tired to haunt me
and friends and family still seem to want me.
So?
Insoluble problems? Outlast them.
No candles? Wait for the dawn.
Tigers? Walk warily past them.
Don’t stir them up; do move on
in this game, never lost, never won.
Jane J. Robinson, 22/7/08
(Next birthday, ninety. Who knows?)
Sunday, June 1, 2008
TIME TO GO
Come away, Love; we've had it here.
What better time to leave than Winter
when the nights are long?
Now while Orion strides the sky, the Dog Star at his heels,
we'll quit this tilted Earth that loops around the same sun every year
and hunt for different fields of stars.
And why should we regret the loss of Spring?
Regret fades fast in vagrant minds like ours.
We'll flash by Saturn first and spin away
in spirals far beyond Magellan's clouds,
aiming whatever we've become toward some dark mass
backlit by the secret suns its dust obscures.
Black holes be damned! And if one sucks us in,
think what a ride we'll have!
.
Here is my hand.
See how the flesh has fallen away
and veins show like the skeletons of leafless trees?
It still holds warmth.
Take it and come fearless
while we run the risks of Time.
We shall be stripped of everything, of course,
pared down to our essential selves;
but on we'll go beyond imaginable Beyond until
we reach the last horizon of events.
There we will rest together,
timeless
and complete
Jane J. Robinson.
June 2008
What better time to leave than Winter
when the nights are long?
Now while Orion strides the sky, the Dog Star at his heels,
we'll quit this tilted Earth that loops around the same sun every year
and hunt for different fields of stars.
And why should we regret the loss of Spring?
Regret fades fast in vagrant minds like ours.
We'll flash by Saturn first and spin away
in spirals far beyond Magellan's clouds,
aiming whatever we've become toward some dark mass
backlit by the secret suns its dust obscures.
Black holes be damned! And if one sucks us in,
think what a ride we'll have!
.
Here is my hand.
See how the flesh has fallen away
and veins show like the skeletons of leafless trees?
It still holds warmth.
Take it and come fearless
while we run the risks of Time.
We shall be stripped of everything, of course,
pared down to our essential selves;
but on we'll go beyond imaginable Beyond until
we reach the last horizon of events.
There we will rest together,
timeless
and complete
Jane J. Robinson.
June 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Wakings
I am riding in a bus...a cab?...
watching the road ahead unwind
through a shadowless desert glare.
I sit behind the driver, separated
from him by a glass partition.
We stop. The driver leaves his seat,
turns and comes to where I am.
He is leaning over me.
He is saying something. Is he asking me
to join him in the front?
His face reminds me of someone,
someone who is dead.
I am confused and cannot move or speak.
This is absurd.
I wait for him to ask again; instead
I hear the song of an insistent mockingbird
and raise my head.
The lighted numbers on the clock
tell that dawn is hours away.
I rise and in darkness take
the familiar route: three steps and touch
the corner of the bureau, leftward then,
reaching for the bathroom door.
Back to bed, relieved, I contemplate
turning on the light,
lapsing into printed page
and turning off my mind.
I do not want to see that road again
unwinding into a sunless glare beyond
this local time and place.
I do not want to face
that half-remembered face.
But now a customary light
lights the room. The mockingbird
is silent. In the wistaria that droops
above the window, a dove is flittering.
Twisting and bobbing her head, she calls
Hitherthitherwhither? Hitherthitherwhither?
Has she forgotten where she put her nest?
I am tired still; in disarray.
Too much coffee, too much poetry last night.
I must change my life. Again.
"Calm down," I tell the anxious dove
as I unhinge,
rise, stretch, begin
to face an uncontrollable day
unrolling towards another night.
Wakings
I am riding in a bus...a cab?...
watching the road ahead unwind
through a shadowless desert glare.
I sit behind the driver, separated
from him by a glass partition.
We stop. The driver leaves his seat,
turns and comes to where I am.
He is leaning over me.
He is saying something. Is he asking me
to join him in the front?
His face reminds me of someone--someone
who is dead.
I am confused and cannot move or speak.
This is absurd.
I wait for him to ask again; instead
I hear the song of an insistent mockingbird
and raise my head.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Body and Self
Some mornings when we two get out of bed,
my aging body feels unhappy. It moves stiffly.
It whines. It complains bitterly
even after I have given it two cups of coffee.
It just wants to go back to bed and read a book.
It’s casting me as the harsh mistress who rides
on the shoulders of this frail dying slave,
cursing it as she flogs it up a steep path
strewn with loose pebbles and thorny plants.
The poor old thing totters on, moaning,
gasping for breath, stumbling over its cane.
Nonsense!
I must feel its pain after all
and I have coddled it with pills, podiatrists,
and expensive shoes.
All I’m asking it to do is support me
as we move about, mostly on the level,
meeting with friends, buying groceries,
trying to keep fit by walking briskly.
An occasional hill perhaps. No tennis.
But once a year I do require it to go with me
to the mountains I love
and carry me around below to gaze
at the remembered heights we once moved through
with all the careless grace we used to share.
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