What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this?
Do they somehow
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't
Who called this morning?
Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous
Watching light move?
If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?
At death, you break up: the bits that were
Start speeding away from each other for
With no one to see.
It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique
To bring to bloom the million-petaled
Of being here.
Next time you can't
There'll be anything else.
And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the
Of choosing gone.
Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines - How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extractingA known book from the shelves; or sometimes
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the
Faint friendliness on the wall some
Rain-ceased midsummer evening.
That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they
An air of baffled absence, trying to be
Yet being here.
For the rooms grow farther,
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and
Of taken breath, and them crouching
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never
How near it is.
This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we
For them is rising ground.
Can they never
What is dragging them back, and how it will end?
Not at night?
Not when the strangers come?
Never,
The whole hideous, inverted childhood?
Well,
We shall find out.
