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.