Super-Sized Series

Aging

 

Artwork by Rose Mary Boehm

 AMBROSE WILKINS
AT THE GYM by Shoshauna Shy
 
Powder blue shorts with racing stripes,
his unlaced tennis shoes are bottoms up
as he balances on his head between
my elliptical and the rowing machine.
Like an outstretched swan folding wings
together, he gracefully lowers his legs
and stands.
I see his hair is white, skin mottled, a bony
man barely 5’4” in Converse All Stars.
His T-shirt reads:
 
                      88 Never Looked
                          So Great
 
as he proceeds to sit down cross-legged
on the mat and rotate his chin
in a crescent formation.
 
One week later, I arrive to find an empty
cake box in the lobby trash, the staff lounging
around the check-in desk among golden streamers.
And there’s the old guy doing laps around the track
wearing a brand-new shirt:
 
                   89 Never Looked
                         So Fine 

 

 

 

Two poems by Sharon Waller Knutson

I think I’ve got OLD Syndrome

my sister says as she sneaks
up on the age of eighty.
The treadmill rocks like a boat.

Shuffling stiffly towards
the age of eighty-three,
I say: I think I have it too.

The letters are shrinking
on the computer screen
like a shirt in scalding water.

I can’t remember what I said
in our last conversation, she says.
Refresh my memory.

What conversation? I ask.
Remember grandma saying
she was going to die at sixty?

Yes, and then she lives to be
ninety-seven, she says. I hope
I don’t live that long, I say.

We both will, she says, as we stare
in the mirror at grandma’s dark
eyes, high cheekbones and smile.


On his 78h Birthday, He Goes Stone Cold Deaf

When a mouse steals
his hearing aid
from his computer desk
and the other aid dies
as he saws the branch
off the Palo Verde tree
which fell across the driveway.

He googles hearing aid clinics
and finds one that fixes aids
and drives sixty miles to Mesa.
When he gets there, they try
but fail to fix the box full
of aids he’s worn since his fifties.

They are closing for lunch
and tell him to come back at 1 pm
and their technician will test him.
But his car battery is dead and refuses
to revive after several attempts
by chargers on different trucks.

So he starts off walking to Walmart
for a battery and sandwich
in triple digit temperatures
and gets lost in a maze
of sidewalks and streets
in a subdivision that dead ends.

After melting like cheese
on a burger in the car,
he asks a clerk in a methadone
clinic for a cup of iced water
and he invites him to wait
in the air conditioned office,

An elderly Asian man examines
every crater in his ears
and declares him 90 per cent deaf.
The new hearing aids drain
our bank account but finally he hears
my real voice for the first time in decades.

 

 

 WEIGHT TRAINING by Barbara Crooker
            and how can you train
            the body to be the body?
             Carrie Addington, “Waist Training   

 

How can I train this aging
body, with its baggage, the freight
load of dinners in France, plates
gleaming with sauce and cream, sauté
pans sizzling, a glass of rosé
at the start of the meal that’s raised
to the setting sun.  Breakfast: an array
of croissants in a basket, display
of confitures, especially les fraises
des bois, wild strawberries.  I’m sedentary:
at my keyboard writing essays
or reading a roman à clef
cushioned in a chair.  The days
when I ran before dawn, gone.  Praise
be to my left knee; the right one says
“mercy” going down stairs.  The pain in places
I never knew existed.  Ahead, there’s a station
and I’m slowly chugging towards it.  No weight
training at the gym or miles on the exercycle can stay
this decline.  In the passenger car, a conductor sways,
pushing his clicker, punching tickets: sprays
of confetti, little o’s litter the aisles, ricochet.

From Slow Wreckage, Grayson Books, 2024   

 

 

Where Does Old Begin? by Lori Levy

Show me Old, if you can, in that lady on the bench.
Don’t give me a number or the hunch of her shoulders,
skin like crepe.  I’m talking about her:
the breath who brought her bones to the park;
the one whose face turns to yours, eyes engaging
as you greet her this morning beneath the oak.
She’s the shift in position, making room on the bench
for the flow to begin:  words strung together,
momentum picking up, until the body disappears
and all you see is what you hear—
flamenco in her voice, precision
in the points she makes, some that swirl you gently
in their grip, others more insistent
like heels clicking the floor.  Where is old?
In her pause to peel an orange
or pull chocolate from a bag?
In the men she’s loved and lost?
The more I look for old, the younger she becomes.
She’s simply had more time to climb
and fall.  More fabric torn,
more holes to patch.

Originally published in Your Daily Poem.

First published in MOON Magazine.  

 

Time Lapse by Marilyn L. Taylor

It’s her seventy-seventh June (her sixty-fourth
with a camera in her hand), and you wonder
why she leaves behind her comfortable hearth
to crouch down on a patch of soggy tundra
taking pictures in the cold. Well, I’ll
tell you why: it’s to press her hands
against that rough young grass, to feel it yield
under her fingers, then to turn her lens
on the wetness underneath, where the soil
hides its buried treasure. Granite pearls,
flint sequins, limestone underpinnings-- they’re all
uncovered now, everything’s exposed! The voyeur
in her goes feverish inside her head
watching seeds moving in their satin bed.

First appeared in Verse-Virtual.

 

 

         Partnered by Peggy Trojan

   Remember when we first shared bed,
   skin hungry, pasted together
   belly to belly?
   Breathing the hot used air,
   letting our limbs go numb,
   we thought we could sleep
   like that forever.
 
   Now we share gold years and bed,
   quiet on our own claimed side,
   space between our weighted backs.
   Breathing our own wide air,
   we move often
   to adjust blood and dreams.
 
  When I sense your body sighing,
  surrendering to sleep,
  I slide my foot across the smooth divide
  to touch your leg for anchor.
 
  From Dust and Fire
  This poem won the Susan Carol Hauser Prize for Writing.
 
 

 Cheek to Cheek by Judith Waller Carroll

Remember all those dance classes
we took when we first retired?
Salsa, two step, Cajun swing.

That fancy waltz we showed off for the kids.
They burst out laughing
when we finished with a bow from the waist.

These days the best we can manage
is a slow shuffle in the kitchen
as we make soup on a rainy day—

my hip bumping yours at the cutting board,
your hand touching my shoulder
as you reach for a spoon,

and in your best Fred Astaire imitation,
croon, Heaven, I’m in heaven, and twirl
me into the dining room, careful of your bad knee.

From What You Saw and Still Remember.  

Buddy and I by Mike Orlock

The streets around my house are aflame with fall
as Buddy and I make our daily rounds.
There’s a briskness to these days of late October,
a crispness to the sound leaves make
skittering in the curb,
and a smoky tang lingers in the air.
 
If Buddy notices he doesn’t care.

He keeps his nose pressed to the ground
(no telling what new smells are there)
and pulls me by the lead from tree to shrub,
as if he’s the one taking me for a walk
and is impatient that I grasp all he wants to share.

We have a sort of understanding, he and I,
if a dog can think along those lines:
I’ll pause long enough for him to sniff out things
at every post and pole or sign
if he’ll pretend to listen when I talk
and answer with a lick from time to time.

I still call Buddy “Little Pup”
although he’s anything but a puppy anymore,
having turned twelve of my years this past summer.
People tell me that’s old for a dog his size,
and I realize that’s true;
his muzzle, once brindled brown, is now white
and cataracts nibble at his sight.
Where once he’d charge across the yard
after any squirrel or rabbit brazen enough to test him,
he now labors to his feet to sniff the air and look.  
 
But I’ve slowed down a step or two myself.

Like alternating chapters in a book,
Buddy’s time and mine seem juxtaposed.
It’s in the quiet of these autumn afternoons,
with Buddy a black shadow at my feet,
that the grief I can’t help but presuppose
tends to dissipate in a blizzard of falling leaves.

Neither of us look with much enthusiasm to winter:
Buddy struggles to climb the piled snow
in search of those remembered places that
still carry a scent of himself;
and I dread the chill that seeps like wet
through my shoes and socks,
and the lengthening nights that close like the lid of a box.

First appeared in Your Daily Poem.  

 

 

Slowing Down by Jacqueline Jules

My fingers are stiff at breakfast
and the stairs sometimes stab my knees.
But my pulse
has slowed down the most —
no longer inclined to race
behind paramedics and police
toward fires smoldering blocks away.

My lungs are weaker, too.
I can’t hold my breath
when a siren wails in the distance.
I must wait till red lights
flash outside my door.

The stamina I had in youth,
to pace the floors till dawn, see monsters
raising claws in every shadow,
has mysteriously compressed with age,
like the bones in my shrinking spine.

But unlike my night vision,
it’s one loss I don’t miss.

Previously published in Snakeskin Poetry in the UK.  

 

 

The Nicest Man by Tamara Madison

Near the end, all his fierceness
is gone. Stroke-softened, trembling
from Parkinson’s, mind veiled
by dementia, this boulder of a man
whose temper terrorized employees
and family alike, spends his days
hunched before the TV watching
M*A*S*H reruns and the Iran-Contra
hearings (I’ve always been a Republican,
but now I’m not so sure, he tells me).
One morning I find the TV tuned to PBS.
Dad! You’re watching Mr. Rogers!
The frightening vehemence back
in his face, he turns to me and growls,
THAT is the NICEST man!

From Morpheus Dips His Oar  

 

 

Today I was touched by Rose Mary Boehm

by warm hands that massaged my right hip.
Bursitis and tendonitis. (Itis. The spellchecker makes it
‘it is’. And it is indeed the most awful of pains.)
Was touched by a warm compress, and a gentle machine
rotating over cold gel, attacking the inflammation;
by the pedicurist who touched every toe. She massaged
my feet and my legs, rubbed my hands gently
with incense and myrrh.

I was touched by my husband missing me,
by photos for grandma of granddaughters
whose parents are beginning to touch
their fifties. By the display of love by a small dog
who lives on my floor.

My friend Bernard died. I learned it from the Internet.

First appeared in Verse-Virtual 

 

Aging by Joan Leotta

I’d like to age like this year’s
gift of birthday roses,
now past their expected prime
but still beautiful.
Bouquets from previous
years have withered,
died after a week, but these continue,
“walking” in beauty
as if they each day they
saluted sunrise with their own pollen.
A few have browned at the edges
of their orange-yellow
splendorous petals.
Leaves have browned and
crackle like paper,
but the roses themselves
are not only lovely
but are now exude an aroma
strong enough to pulse through
the dining room into the kitchen,
to wrap me in their heady
scent of love remembered,
each time I sit down
for my morning coffee.
It seems to me that scent,
so rare in purchased, hothouse roses,
is even stronger now than
when the roses first came home
with my husband’s grin.
Each time I stroke a still-soft petal,
I think again, how
I want to age like these roses,
velvet and strong, exuding
the aroma of love even in old age.

From Feathers on Stone


 If You Grow Old It Is Your Own Fault by Joe Cottonwood

“If you grow old, it is your own fault,”
I say to Terry as we climb
the mountain behind his cabin.
Terry is wearing a device that transmits his heartbeat
by cell phone to doctors at Stanford.
Terry has a flutter, nothing serious, probably.
Terry has a great heart, actually,
something serious, warm and wise.

We ascend this hill on Tuesdays every week
discussing poetry and plumbing, our twin passions:
the gathering of mountain water funneled into pipes,
delivered to homes,
the ordering of words funneled into pages
delivered nowhere, sadly.

We discuss friends fallen or falling,
the arc of marriages, parenthood, oddball relationships,
each a story and a puzzlement,
webs woven of love and rage.
That, and motorcycles, we talk,
pacifist veterans who walk still seeking sense
of an incomprehensible war that shaped our lives.
Objectors, conscientious, we realized too late,
not an easy path but better than following orders.
We walked away from war.
He, the Air Force; I, the draft.
Branded dishonorable.
So we hike, hearts pounding,
the simple friendship of two old men
seeking the hilltop
again and again.

First appeared in MOON Magazine