Age

The days are still here.
That is the first surprise.
Morning arrives, then evening.
Light moves across the room
as though nothing has happened.

But something has happened.

The world has gone on
and loosened its hold on me.
Not entirely.
Enough.

I sit at the table writing things
no one may read.
Not because they are secret.
Because they are late.
Because by the time a man has spent years
trying to turn feeling into language,
the language itself has begun to thin.
It remains,
but like winter light on a wall,
it does not warm what it touches.

The house is quiet.
No one knocks.
The city continues somewhere beyond me,
busy with its appetites,
its errands,
its faith in tomorrow.
I hear it only faintly.
A murmur through glass.
Another country.

Once I imagined age
would bring some grave composure,
a chair by the fire,
a deepened knowledge,
the serene authority of one
who has suffered and understood.
Instead it is more ordinary.
You wait.
You make coffee.
You answer what must be answered.
You look at the clock.
You try again.

Each morning I kiss her goodbye.
This remains.
Her leaving for the day,
the small closing of the door,
the instant after,
when the house seems to step back from me
and become only rooms again.
That moment is always larger than it should be.

Then the hours.
The long republic of hours.
Work, if it can be called that.
The making of things
out of thought, memory, fragments,
the hope that meaning is still possible
even when witness is not.
I go on with it.
What else is there to do?

Sometimes messages arrive.
Rarely the ones one wants.
Need has a way of finding us.
So does correction.
So does the mild indifference
people call concern.
What is missing is almost never drama.
Only presence.
Only someone staying
without wanting anything.

This is harder to confess now
than it once would have been:
the hunger not for admiration,
not for rescue,
but simply to be accompanied.
To have one’s existence
briefly confirmed by another person
not out of duty
but because they chose to remain.

At night she returns
and the world resumes its shape.
We talk.
We eat.
There is tenderness still.
There is the old astonishment
that love, in some form, survives
the many humiliations of time.
For a few hours
life becomes inhabited again.

Then sleep fails in its usual way.
I wake in the dark.
The mind begins its old machinery.
Regret.
Inventory.
Fear without object.
Fear with object.
The body beside me breathing.
The room almost erased.
And that familiar thought,
not dramatic anymore,
only patient:
how long can this continue?

Morning returns with its answer:
long enough.

The mirror offers its revisions.
Hair gone gray, then thin.
The face less declaration than residue.
A man translated poorly by time.
And yet inside,
some earlier self still waits
to be recognized,
still believes, absurdly,
that he has just entered the room.

This may be the sharpest part of aging,
not pain,
not limitation,
but discrepancy.
The widening distance
between the one who feels himself present
and the one the world has begun
to file under past.

To be overlooked is not nothing.
It is a weight.
A slow pressure.
You begin by noticing it in others.
Then one day it has settled on you.
You are no longer expected.
No one says this.
They simply move around you
with increasing ease.

Still, I keep making things.
Words, mostly.
Shapes of thought.
Small resistances against erasure.
I do not know who they are for.
Perhaps no one.
Perhaps that is not the point.

Perhaps the point is only this:
to answer the day
while one is still in it.
To place something, however slight,
against the blankness.
To say I was here
not loudly,
not even convincingly,
but with whatever remains.

And if twenty years are left,
what then?
More mornings.
More partings at the door.
More pages.
More nights waking
into the enormous dark
where every life, famous or forgotten,
goes on briefly thinking itself singular.

Then less.
Then none.

I do not know if I will be remembered.
Probably not for long.
This is not bitterness.
It is only scale.
The world forgets almost everyone.
Even grief, eventually,
grows tired.

But today the light is on the table.
Today the hand still moves.
Today someone will come home by evening.
For now
this is enough to keep me here,
among the visible things,
a little longer.