Date-of-Birth
Dec 29 2006


Date-of-birth works just fine for clerks
and interrogators.

But birthdays come with wrapping paper
and beaming faces bearing cakes
all made-up like firecracker day.

There is that shifting age
when you go from giddy anticipation
to ambivalence,
coyly evasive as they press
but secretly hoping the guess will flatter you,
and suspicious
of bathroom scales and mirrors.
Nevertheless, as it’s said,
another birthday sure beats the alternative!

Death is an impossible abstraction,
as hard to grasp as infinity
or the temperature at the core of the sun.
Yet I’ve never agonized or wondered
about how the world happily went on without me
before I was born;
so why any different after I’m gone?

Every year, another candle
— that much harder to extinguish the light.
Which is a nice metaphor for a long and fruitful life,
but hardly reassuring when you run short of breath.
So why not a layer for every year instead?
Cake piled high to the ceiling
carried-in by 10 men
swaying and leaning precariously
like some concoction out of Dr. Seuss.
Enough to feed a battalion
of friends.