This Kind of Fire

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how aging creates a fire in the belly. We have limited time left. Some of us furiously scribble or travel or begin to say what we really mean and begin to live the life we imagined. The fire is not blazing but one of a new, gentle burnished glow.  Many of us have buried friends, siblings, our parents. We know we can’t stop time (great book, btw) but we are  indignant at the changes time brings.

As a Boomer, I never thought I’d age, yet daily the mirror accosts me with werewolf-like hairs in odd places. As the hormones twist and shout, I find it amusing  to be entering a second stage adolescence . I have much in common with the teenager down the street who sneaks out at night to smoke dope with his friends at the beach. But I am responsible and in my bed tossing and turning trying to get some sleep so that I can work the next day while he is out, feeling like he owns the world. No fair!

Today I was reading poems about aging for a workshop I will teach in the spring and I came across this Charles Bukowski poem called “This Kind of Fire.” It made me laugh and it punched me in the gut at the same time. This is what the best poems do. I felt a sharp longing for a world I never knew, when man believed in multiple gods who controlled our fates. Now it feels like no one is out there.

this kind of fire

sometimes I think the gods

deliberately keep pushing me

into the fire

just to hear me

yelp

a few good

lines.

they just aren’t going to

let me retire

silk scarf about neck

giving lectures at

Yale.

the gods need me to

entertain them.

they must be terribly

bored with all

the others

and I am too.

and now my cigarette lighter

has gone dry.

I sit here

hopelessly

flicking it.

this kind of fire

they can’t give

me.