Probably 20 good years remain to me
If family history holds
But that account abounds in clean living
Cleaner than I have ever maintained

And history abounds also with counter-examples
Uncle Kermit a heart attack at fifty
Though not conspicuously overweight
More like soft and dainty and not even a smoker

Uncle Len lasted longer
Though a teeming barrel of vice
Loud obese and wildly impulsive
Unlike my well-tempered mother

Who made it nearly to a hundred
But the last years were bad for her
So maybe 15 good years left for me and 5 less so
Or 10 and 10 or 3 or 2

Two more uncles bald and roly-poly
Spent time in the pen for working the bolita
Not noted for longevity
Nor for much else that I know of

I don’t know why I’m on about my uncles
Except that my mother
Second of fourteen siblings
Outlived them all

My father was flayed on the deck of the Saratoga
Skin cancer the year of my birth
Colon cancer at 70
That killed him twenty years later

Maybe I have 10 or 20
Or 2 or 3 or next to none
But I’m in the home stretch way past halfway
I won’t make it to 134

I was living in twilight
The sun having set but the sky still bright
Darker now
And in the streetlit city you can’t see many stars

It’s harder to do math now
Harder to climb the stairs
Harder to watch my grandchildren
As they trudge unwillingly to bed

The last quarter of my life or whatever fraction
Learning how to die
Having shed my skin for the last time
My protective shell ever thicker and hornier

Harder to drop defenses and tell the truth
I fear this
Thinking back on 20 and 20 and 20
Pop of a flash cube and the last quarter turn

Truth is obvious but hard to tell
I wish I could give you birds
In ambiguous undulations
Misty mountains or ragged claws

I could maybe give you the salt marsh
The smell of the salt marsh
The fructifying decay
The gravid putrefaction

I gradually deliquesce
The Dorian picture of greedy gravitation
Meet my sisters Phrygian Lydian and Mixolydian
Who will long outlast me

The picture of the downward pull
Of repeated insults to body and mind
The picture of most everybody
Who lasts this long

My friend Steve refuses to grow old
Works out eats right
But I’m not body-building
Quite the contrary

I can handle the physical collapse
It’s the mental rummage
That rattles me
That binds me fast to the dizzying wheel