Lovely Max
P tasting now of sediment and lees.
Not sure about being too late too late -not me anyway what's a kindle what's
an ipod let me get my hands on them !!
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 09 November 2011 01:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: snap: after montaigne
After Montaigne
Soon I shall have passed my fifty-sixth year
(him, that is - myself seventy-fourth) -
more than the traditional term of life!
Haven't there been nations that put old folk down?
Yet still I have flurries of youthfulness
so bright they recreate for me
the feel of younger days.
I don't run any more - it's enough that I can creep.
My life's not as sound and long as an oak-tree's,
but at work in us both is natural decay.
I'm nearing the bottom of the cask,
tasting now of sediment and lees.
(He had his own vineyard and cellar!
I finish off the odd bottle of red.)
2
Lately a tooth of mine fell out - painlessly,
of its own accord. Well, it'd reached its use-by
date - as have other parts of me I won't name.
Thus I melt and steal away from myself
step by step down a gentle slope.
Perhaps before I note my sight is failing
I shall have reached stone-blindness.
Is my hearing growing dull?
People nowadays refuse to speak up.
3
To make the soul feel how it's ebbing
you must press, press and press it.
All our life has death mixed in with it.
Even into our growth decay slips through.
These old portraits (his - in my case passports) -
here I'm twenty-five, here thirty-five.
Compared with this recent one,
in how many ways are they no longer myself!
Before the end is reached, by how much more
will my looks change? By how much more
am I myself yet to change?
4
Lingering so long, we've tired Nature out.
Now she's forced to quit us. Teeth, eyes,
limbs, and upkeep - all left to the mercy
we must beg from others.
Well, these are the laws of our being,
which we must suffer patiently;
despite all medicine - old, feeble, sick.
What madness, to pray for one's lost youth!
For long journeys expect heat, gale, and flood.
For long years, gout, kidney-stones, sick gut.
5
No one can restore you, at best patch and prop
you a little, an hour or two prolonging misery.
Mind - it's mind's privilege to rescue itself
from old age. I've long urged mine to this.
Any green shoots are like mistletoe on a dead tree.
And when body calls, instantaneously
mind deserts me. I wheedle and deal with it apart -
in vain. They're in such cahoots - though I offer mind
the classics, beautiful women - if body
comes down with colic, down comes mind too.
6.
With one foot in the grave,
we still give birth to appetites.
At least I've learned to look ahead
no more than just one year.
The only comfort I note in old age
is the deadening of cares:
care how the world goes,
care for riches, knowledge,
health, or even myself.
Others are studying how to speak
when what they should be learning
is eternal silence.
7
Too late to change myself, find a new course,
though it might enhance my life.
Too late for any new enjoyment.
(Too late to master the new iPhone.)
Fancy a person acquiring decency so late,
fit to live when so little life is left!
As I make my exit I'd gladly consign
to any newcomer late-won wisdom only he can apply.
Dinner's over, too late for mustard!
8.
For a man whose head's gone soft what use
is knowledge? Blessings even are no use now.
We need no art to fall: the bottom
is reached of itself.
I'm finishing off this man I am,
not remaking another one out of him.
9
Too late for writing and printing.
Whoever submits his senile mind to the presses
is mad if he hopes to extract anything
which does not stink of a man who is
ugly, raving and half-asleep.
(Present company excepted.)
Max de Richards
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