By some grace of fate we sit
Quietly, talking of life;
We, at this place where roads meet.
Where worried travelers
Ask “whither?” and “whence?”

Is your sense renewed at this meeting?
And do you see in my face
The stern advance of age? Detect
In my voice a mortal despair?

I have looked at you and seen
The child in red shoes
Who studied with knitted brow
Her *****, wounded finger.

I have seen the girl who ran
Unsteadily like a colt
On slender legs; who laughed
At Time as though
Years bear gifts for children.

And as we trudged
By different paths toward this place,
I have never looked back
With as much longing
As I do today.

Winter’s length is measured
in your eyes.
And from our words
I can discern
that Spring steps hesitantly
around our brittle souls.

I know I have not weathered well.
I have not weathered well.

And is that why you cannot tell
me (the one who shares your cell)
what secret shadows
winter cast on you,
what aches it conjured
in your willow-lovely bones?

The Adirondacks shimmer
white to gray
as restless clouds
muster, murmur, and pass.

Am I vain to think
that your soul throws
itself against that swirling sky,
shares its passing moods,
broods as it broods,
‘til spring’s uncertain hope
blooms in your eyes?

A year,
one year has passed.
It crept down the alley in the back
darkening the neighbors' houses
brick by brick.

And now I see it in our faces
and all the shadowed places we forget.
The year has moved from left to right,
from salad plate to coffee cup.
It shows its shadow when your cheeks lift up
to smile, and underneath your lip,
it stained your teeth precisely
where you sip
your tea.

You drum your fingers on the sugar tin
and laugh from deep inside your blouse.

But I have seen its wake;
and soon I shall make myself
awake at six and shave to Debussy.
I shall bring the decades to their knees.

I know you laugh behind your eyes,
yet, still, someday you’ll cry out loud,
“I wish I’d stuck with him
and hadn’t drummed my fingers
on the sugar tin.”

A forest of spring-green lilies
perforates the earth
between our house
and the sidewalk.

And you can think
of nothing else.

I.
We laugh about it as we age:
Becoming our parents.
Women, about wearing housecoats,
Kleenex in the sleeve, anile,
Muttering vague execrations
At the husband
Or the cat.

We men, about thinning hair,
Shoulder no good
For throwing,
Expressions from another time:
“You’re a sight for sore eyes!”

It scares and comforts us,
I suppose,
That we are destined to reprise
The fading song our parents played
On their way through life.
We cannot help
But long to know,
How the melody will go
When life’s light flickers
And dies.

II.
In all those silly ways, it’s true,
That I am becoming you—
Skinny legs,
Thick in my middle,
Age spots on these hands,
Dappled as a trout
But rough and dry,
Like yours.

I even guess
I ache as you ached
To see my child prepare for college.
I yearn, as I think you yearned,
To know how time swept by
Like a gust in autumn
Rolling before it the russet leaves of days,
Passing with no more than
A gentle breath upon the face.

In these ways, too,
I am becoming you,
Or always was:
Troubled, soulful, anxious,
Stirred by life’s incantatory dirge.

III.
And yet I know
That you were something great,
While I am merely aging.

When you trudged
Your path through Hell,
Your soul surged,
As if to run life’s gauntlet
Were somehow nourishment
For the man you knew to become.

My hells are simple matters:
Midlife’s usual trials,
Banal and contained,
Seldom rising to heroic.

You—you strove with God,
Fulminating and proud.
Like Ulysses,
You fell spent upon your deathbed,
Glowing like the ember of a demigod.

IV.
I shall become you
In all the little ways that life allows:
Absent-minded,
Saturnine.
But I have not lunged upon Antaeus,
Nor ever will.

Still, I am your son.
That right is mine—
Though my hells are not Hades
And my foes are not Gods.
Yet, I long to give a loud report
When my final day is shot;
To have striven well with Self,
Subdued, at least, my mundane.

That much I hope to do
In my own way
In becoming you.