Marking Time

Sept 17 2015

You will be surprised, when you get this old

to find you feel the same;

still 20-something,

wondering how age

crept up on you.

Surprised you inhabit

this obstinate body

as if betrayed,

its steady decline

too slow to notice.

Surprised

by your disappointment

there was no revelation;

the serenity

you were led to expect,

the enlightened acceptance of self.

This is the wisdom

the young project on the old,

bamboozled

by the distinguished appearance

of grey hair, and wrinkled skin,

the arthritic gait

that merely seems unrushed.

But surprised, mostly

by how quickly life happened.

Like a bystander, afraid to get involved

you stood on the sidelines and watched,

whipsawed by time

as it went racing past.

I felt this, gazing out the kitchen window,

where I could see time's passage

take substance, and form;

the abstraction of time

made material.

The thin sapling

I’d planted when I bought the place

has become a towering spruce;

dense branches, casting shade,

invisible roots

giving life to the soil.

All these years, out of thin air;

assembling carbon, accumulating light,

the power of the sun

in its chemical bonds.

I see it there, and realize

just how much time

has come, and gone.

I suppose I can claim it as mine –

I planted it, it grows in my yard.

But this affinity

goes only so far.

Because I did nothing but watch,

out my window

over dirty dishes

day after day,

a pleasant green presence

of which I was vaguely aware.

And because after I’m gone

it will still be there.

An even grander tree;

indifferent to my passage,

the property

of someone else.

But still

we have grown old together;

a man who is getting on

and one magnificent spruce

still in the prime of life.

As a child inscribes her height

with a line on the wall,

the tree I planted when we both were young

is also marking time;

making it real

before my eyes.

OK, it isn't really that towering a tree. And spruce trees, by and large, aren't all that magnificent: they're prone to wind-fall, and rot.

But the day I wrote this poem, as I stood at the sink cleaning up, I found myself focusing further out: paying attention to this tree, instead of merely registering it. Which is when it struck me like a thunderclap: time manifest, substantive and real. I've been feeling more than the usual aches and pains, so remembering how this tree began brought home -- inescapably -- the passage of time. I've noticed this for awhile, but in a more general way: how all the trees I planted -- when I couldn't plant enough, and they seemed too small to do much good, or even survive -- have now grown up to enclose my house in shade; overwhelming the walkways, leaning perilously over the deck.

Young people don't recognize this: that inside these faltering bodies, we feel exactly as young as they do. We still keep making the same mistakes, performing the same immature acts, indulging in the same idealistic hopes and desires. You get stuck at a certain age --somewhere in the late teens or early twenties (and if you're Donald Trump, maybe somewhere around 8 or 9!) -- and are shocked when you realize how others see you ...when you see yourself ...when your body betrays you. And shocked when you realize just how much time has gone.

It's also another tree poem. These are like the deer and dog poems: they keep coming up. So here again are the familiar tropes of stewardship, the miracle of photosynthesis, the usefulness and beauty of trees.

If there is anything stylistic in this poem that merits a comment, I suppose it's the liberal use of semi-colons. (I just counted: a total of 8, sprinkled throough 74 lines.) I've written before that I love semi-colons. But I usually set strict limits, because I know how they're misunderstood, or viewed suspiciously, or even despised. I find them especially useful in poetry. In prose, they help organize thoughts, give order to the longer and more complicated sentences. But in poetry, they help dictate the pace. Since poetry is meant to be recited, I think it's useful to give the reader a road map, or the equivalent of a musical score: so there's the hesitation of the normal line break; the prolonged pause of the comma; the good time-out of the semi-colon; and finally, the full stop of the period. The problem with semi-colons is that they can appear prescriptive, rigid, anal. They show a distrust of the reader, and could make her feel patronized. And they give the page a cluttered look.