We reach for the same poetry book
by a young hotshot poet
with an old man’s eye for sorrow.
I hand you the thin volume
as if I had attempted a theft
and recoiled with remorse.
It is your ninetieth summer
you tell me, and I am as tall as your husband was
who you describe with soft resignation:
a solemn, untidy, unruly man
who died climbing a mountain
of wine and whiskey bottles
during your sixty-eighth summer.
I do not count my summers,
I whisper among the book browsers
but I do look over my shoulder
and see my distant youth weeping—
inarticulate grievance, I admit,
but grievance all the same.
You remember the first time you made love
but sometimes you forget your address.
I smile uneasily, straining to recall my first time
knowing my address all too well.
I have forgotten so much
you say, looking at the book’s back cover,
and fingers trembling,
touch the young poet’s photo
read with difficulty, lips quivering,
about the keen eye for humanity’s foibles and fears.
What will I forget? I inquire,
of the woman and of the god of memory—
the god of memory, I repeat,
an entreaty, perhaps a sad reflex.
God has taken most of your memory,
you lament, your eyes seeming to be remembering,
and you ask me to take your arm
and sing with you
the song that made you believe in love
and never getting old
the words to which
you remember as clearly
as during your nineteenth summer
when, you say, love exceeded history.
