I’m supposed to be this hundred and two
year old antiquity on the edge of cancellation,
right? I won’t get into the patho-physiological
details, OK, but here I am having my
honeyed oakflakes and hot chocolate
for breakfast, getting my brain ready to
go out into the garden and try to poeticize
the flowers, bugs and mini-animals all
over the place, my gerontologist M.D.
wife over at the clinic where she works
(kind of a walking museum of white or
no hair and bent-over wrinkled, varicosed
bodies), when the front door bell rings
and....who is it? Alexandra (35) and
Beatrice (2) from Louisville-Kansas City,
now Ann Arbor, “I was just bored, Ray
over at the library, the two of us just
home, and I thought you might be
lonely...let’s go to the park or river or
lake or mall or....,” little elf-beauty Beatrice
and her almost hispanic-looking art-genius
mom, and suddenly my knees and back
and eyes, guts, weltanshauung/world-view
are twenty-four again, instead of a hundred
and two, and I want to find unexplored,
untouched (at least since Neanderthal
times) territory where I can turn the stones into
colleges and cathedrals and bungalows,
find hill-land to plow and plant my corn
and potatoes in, plant my apple and peach
trees, rivers to fish in, plains for my cows
and bulls....time for my wife to return too
and start paying attention to the mirror instead
of the microscope.