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.
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.
RSS Feed