Have I Reach This Age
Have I reached this age,
And learned nothing but
Everything that begins in hope
Must end in despair?
That every desire is paired with envy?
The garden dies.
The heart lies.
The serpent survives.
That every confidence is a betrayal.
The mirror each one holds
Wherein the other sees himself:
Are those distorted images
That I see, or reflections of the self
I am and would not be?
I have lived beyond
My father’s age
And kept alive his stifled rage.
The earth is blanketed with disease
The leaves are browning on the trees.
I walk with bent and painful knees.
The storms in Lear’s shattered realm
Infect the heavens.
The curses in his heart
Blow like a tempest.
Or are they his daughters’ jealousy and rancor
Catalyzed to whip and batter him?
What does he know of sin
Until it takes its toll on him?
Poor naked wretch
Embracing the storm
Caught between a bear
And the raging sea.
Handy dandy:
Who is the master
Who the fool?
Who is kind
And who is cruel?
How long I have held
This grime in my heart,
This ash in my throat?
The voices I could not hear
Ring now incessantly
In my ear.
I thought of love
As another dimension
Where I did not dwell,
A cure for loss
And the spirit’s dissension.
I was wrong.
Love is the sirens’ song.
My tongue was burned
When I was young.
I cannot speak.
The rabbis cut my tonsils out.
I wept for days
In nameless grief
And trudged, a child
Clothed in an old man’s grief.
Now, fire is a will o’ the wisp,
A fatuous flame on a blackened heath.
What good can Gloucester do,
A man hoodwinked and unhoused,
Blinded by seeing aright,
Lost in the agony of night
A broken lantern
Betrayed by a son,
A bitter and a pitiful sight?
O, teach me to distinguish
Between foolishness and faith,
Between loss and birth.