How Many Old?

Aug 30 2019

As I sit at my desk

and dusk descends

and August ends too soon,

I can't help but notice

just how much the days are shortening.

The slope of time steepening

the planet's axis tilting

its heat bleeding slowly away.

I can feel the cooler air

settling in for fall,

the thinner light it carries

its incremental weight.

It is a truism

that time goes faster with age.

And it feels that summer is ending

with too much left undone

before it had even begun.

While fall, in all its bitter-sweetness

has somehow already come;

the turning leaves,

a vanguard of geese

honking bossily south,

wood-smoke

with its slightly acrid nose.

Not so much a season

as an interlude;

a cool sorbet

to refresh the palate

a landing along a stairs.

A restorative pause

before winter's hard ascent.

I can feel my body

prepare itself for rest,

eating, sleeping

conserving

despite my best intent.

The long cold hibernation

eons of evolution

have exquisitely shaped us for.

Because this is how we age ourselves,

counting down by summers

by winters counting up.

How many years young

you may ask.

Or, with the gravitas of winter, how many old?

Lazy, fat, and grizzled

huddling around the stove.

Graph day length through the year, and it appears as a sine curve: its slope flattening as it heads into the turns, the steepening as it falls. And when it approaches the bottom, the rate of change slowing again until it bottoms out. And in the way we unconsciously process the passage time, we all sense we are in that period of steep decline: where days shorten rapidly, until winter darkness abides and day-length roughly equals out.

Who doesn't feel young in summer? While in winter, just as in old age, everything becomes more difficult. We feel our age in the cold.

I feel it's kind of taking the path of least resistance to write a poem — another poem, that is!

— about the seasons. And it's hard to avoid cliches like fallen leaves and the smell of wood-smoke. Especially because they are so instantly evocative. So I hope I've managed to inject a little originality into an old theme. Maybe I was moved to write because the feelings in this poem were particular hard to avoid, this year: such an early fall, and such a feeling of incompletion it has brought. It seems as if one winter runs into the next, with just a short break in between.