Tag: Aging

How She Lost Her Mind

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By April Lindner

Featured Art: Drawing – Collage by Joan Miró

Slowly at first, the arteries
in the brain’s finely spun net
narrow one by one
_____________to dead ends;
like the hand’s delicate motion,
__________a series of strokes

erase what took decades to write.

Difficult tasks forgotten first:
_______________how to merge onto a highway,
___________________knit a sweater,
_______________________buy a stamp.
Then the simpler ones,
___________________how to turn on an oven,
_______________________what goes in a cup.

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’69

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathy Fagan

Featured Art: Alfred Sisley by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

If it’s been ten times it’s been forty-five
I’ve checked the man out in the car behind
mine, teeth bared, laughing in my rearview.

I cannot stop myself from watching him,
sun full on his face. He’s all alone—
we are, among our fellow rush commuters—

and then it dawns on me: it’s Mr. Cahill
from sixth grade, my first male teacher (heart, be still!),
who taught sex ed to us in ‘69,

in Catholic school, till someone narked and he
was gone for good. Those days, we venerated
the venereal, reciting sex words right

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My Life

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jack Myers

Featured Art: October Day by Jean Charles Cazin

was never large enough even for a B movie
though I think I’ve felt as deeply as Brad Pitt.
No one I grew up with ever became famous
or notorious on that spit of land that ended in the sea.
But we became as adept at reading storm warnings
in the muscle and color of water as we did in a face.

In the cold-war doldrums of the 50s, all my teachers
hated teaching. We were such little shits back then
I thought who could blame them, and became a teacher
so I could show these younger versions of myself
how to open their hearts and enter into a different,
richer kind of darkness that exists in them.

We were an obstinate desert people given a single animal
which we rode and milked and roasted and skinned.
The stories strangers told us about fabulous places
we’d never get to taught us how to open a door in rock
and go inward, how to widen our hearts with longing
and a song and bang along on a drum skin and a string.

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Plans

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jack Myers

Featured Art: Houses of Parliament, London by Claude Monet

I thought of my soul as something like a scent,
like an air of kindliness. That my selfish heart
would grow enormous in battle. I thought I could help
the troubled because I was troubled. I wanted my humility
to be large, to float like a balloon above the parade I was in.

But you know how it goes. My epic turned out to be
a miniature self-portrait painted on a brick from a wall
in me that had fallen in. My oxen were small as bugs.
My arrows that I imagined shredding the sky like black rain
in a Japanese ink print melted back into brushstrokes.

So it’s good to feel small once more, to bow at the end
of a long line of becoming everything again. No more
struggling to fit in after wind-light sweeps me up or a dying
ember takes me in as easily as I thought my life should have been.

Or maybe what’s next will be harder or nothing or I’ll be
totally surprised without there being a me. I always felt like
that anyway. But the place in me where all of this is missing
has turned sacred over time. That’s the best explanation I have
for why we aren’t allowed to know even the simplest things.

The History of Forgetting

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder

When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn’t yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.

What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn’t appear to
require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.

It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they’d lost, and so to survive
they’d need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.

These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.

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Degeneration

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stefi Weisburd

Featured Art: Stoke-by-Nayland by John Constable

Through the forest’s dark persistence, hugging
the relentless road, you search the inevitable
for the sad address, then find yourself paused

in front of the driveway, just
before your halogens startle the dim
windows, the porch out of joint, in that moment

before you are knotted irrevocably
to the future, to her avocado refrigerator whining
like a beast, its gullet full of Ice Age ice cream and the odd

trap-sprung mouse in a Ziploc, before the legions
of art magazines piled in solemn cairns and the Old Countries
purpling her arms, her throat’s

dry drapery and the keys to abandoned
rooms clutched
like a crucifix. In that moment

before her body slips
out of itself and she dampens the floor, before
her ears traffic in the static of her dead

father’s scolding, before her dull
doe eyes fever with fury and shadows hunch like Dante,
before she calls you “Mother,” demanding

you wipe her ass, before her heart cherries and
Tolstoys, in that moment, turned in the driveway, before
all that, back out. Gun it.

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Reunion

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas

Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of the stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn’t remember us.
It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.