Tag Archives: age

Weekend read: Marcus Bales, ‘Ambush’

You’re smiling, nodding, entering some room
Where what weight you once swung you swung for years,
Acknowledging this or that one, most of whom
Are people you politely call your peers.

And like the step you miss that wasn’t there
Kaboom: the rush returns. Awareness bursts
Enormously inside and out, the where
And when, the who and why, the lasts, the firsts.

Then no one listens as you start to speak,
And there’s another, higher, step you miss.
You squint, and almost hear the leather creak,
But readiness is all there is of this.

Your saddlebags and holsters do not rate.
There’s nothing to fight out of if you can.
The ambush turns, indifferently, to wait
For something more than you. Move on, old man.

*****

Editor: I like this poem as it is. However there appears to be more backstory, and Marcus Bales assembles the following: an excerpt from ‘Lonesome Dove’, and Daniel Keys Moran’s comments, and Marcus Bales’ own comments:

After a few minutes the empty feeling passed, but Call didn’t get to his feet. The sense that he needed to hurry, which had been with him most of his life, had disappeared for a space.
“We might as well go on to Montana,” he said. “The fun’s over around here.”

Augustus snorted, amused by the way his friend’s mind worked.

“Call, there never was no fun around here,” he said. “And besides, you never had no fun in your life. You wasn’t made for fun. That’s my department.”

“I used the wrong word, I guess,” Call said.

“Yes, but why did you?” Augustus said. “That’s the interesting part.”

Call didn’t feel like getting drawn into an argument, so he kept quiet.

“First you run out of Indians, now you’ve run out of bandits, that’s the pint,” Augustus said. “You’ve got to have somebody to outwit, don’t you?”

“I don’t know why I’d need anybody when I’ve got you,” Call said.

Even though he still came to the river every night, it was obvious to Call that Lonesome Dove had long since ceased to need guarding. The talk about Bolivar calling up bandits was just another of Augustus’s overworked jokes. He came to the river because he liked to be alone for an hour, and not always be crowded. It seemed to him he was pressed from dawn till dark, but for no good reason. As a Ranger captain he was naturally pressed to make decisions—and decisions that might mean life or death to the men under him. That had been a natural pressure—one that went with the job. Men looked to him, and kept looking, wanting to know he was still there, able to bring them through whatever scrape they might be in. Augustus was just as capable, beneath all his rant, and would have got them through the same scrapes if it had been necessary, but Augustus wouldn’t bother rising to an occasion until it became absolutely necessary. He left the worrying to Call—so the men looked to Call for orders, and got drunk with Augustus. It never ceased to gripe him that Augustus could not be made to act like a Ranger except in emergencies. His refusal was so consistent that at times both Call and the men would almost hope for an emergency so that Gus would let up talking and arguing and treat the situation with a little respect.

But somehow, despite the dangers, Call had never felt pressed in quite the way he had lately, bound in by the small but constant needs of others. The physical work didn’t matter: Call was not one to sit on a porch all day, playing cards or gossiping. He intended to work; he had just grown tired of always providing the example. He was still the captain, but no one had seemed to notice that there was no troop and no war. He had been in charge so long that everyone assumed all thoughts, questions, needs and wants had to be referred to him, however simple these might be. The men couldn’t stop expecting him to captain, and he couldn’t stop thinking he had to. It was ingrained in him, he had done it so long, but he was aware that it wasn’t appropriate anymore. They weren’t even peace officers: they just ran a livery stable, trading horses and cattle when they could find a buyer. The work they did was mostly work he could do in his sleep, and yet, though his day-to-day responsibilities had constantly shrunk over the last ten years, life did not seem easier. It just seemed smaller and a good deal more dull.
Call was not a man to daydream—that was Gus’s department—but then it wasn’t really daydreaming he did, alone on the little bluff at night. It was just thinking back to the years when a man who presumed to stake out a Comanche trail would do well to keep his rifle cocked. Yet the fact that he had taken to thinking back annoyed him, too: he didn’t want to start working over his memories, like an old man. Sometimes he would force himself to get up and walk two or three more miles up the river and back, just to get the memories out of his head. Not until he felt alert again—felt that he could still captain if the need arose—would he return to Lonesome Dove.

“Ambush” developed out of following Daniel Keys Moran on F*c*book. For some time now he has been posting about coming changes in his life, one of which is retirement from the work-force. My poem actually has no connection to his situation at all, apart from my also having retired. He was a much bigger deal, in charge of a lot more than I ever was, in any of my endeavors, but within my limits I was usually in charge of whatever small enterprises I participated in. I imagine the experience of going from being in charge to being supernumary is about the same, internally, for everyone.

Moran posted the excerpt from McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” just recently, as, I inferred, a comment and possibly a reflection on his situation. It certainly resonated with me. Of course Call, the Captain in “Lonesome Dove”, and Moran, and the narrator of “Ambush” all have different situations and different reactions. But there is, I think a family resemblance.

*****

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Real Photo Hard Drinking Handsome Cowboys at the Deadwood Dick Saloon Studio Photograph RPPC AZO Stamp Box Hennesy Canadian Club Holland Gin Old Crow 2” by UpNorth Memories – Don Harrison is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘I Started Out Alone’

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I started out alone,
No numbers and no words.
The people gave me food and clothes.
I loved the sun and birds.

And when I reach the end
Numbers and words all done,
Have to be fed and dressed again,
I’ll love the birds and sun.

*****

This is one of my favourite poems, for several reasons:
First, it extols the combination of curiosity, enjoyment and acceptance that I believe is appropriate for this thing called life.
Second, it is simple in expression: simple words, simple rhythm, in iambics with simple full and slant rhymes.
And third (and perhaps most importantly) it is easy to memorise: it has lodged itself in my brain without any effort or even intent on my part and, as this blog frequently claims, that is the essence of poetry.

‘I Started Out Alone’ was originally published in Bewildering Stories in 2019. More recently it was included in a batch of my poems that Michael R. Burch spotlighted in The Hypertexts for August 2024.

Photo: “Baby face” by matsuyuki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘The Way It Ended’

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So time went by and they were middle-aged,
which seemed a cruel joke that time had played
on two young lovers. They were newly caged
canary birds – amused, not yet afraid.
A golden anniversary came around
where jokes were made and laughing stories told.
The lovers joined the laugh, although they found
the joke – though not themselves – was growing old.
She started losing and forgetting things.
Where had she left her keys, put down her comb?
Her thoughts were like balloons with broken strings.
Daily he visited the nursing home
to make her smile and keep her in their game.
Death came at last. But old age never came.

*****

Gail White writes: “Time is the strangest of the conditions we live in. Scientists, essayists, and poets can ring endless changes on this theme. Time has devastated the lives of the couple in this sonnet, but as Solomon told us long ago, love is as strong as death.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘The Way It Ended’ was first published in 14 by 14 (which has also ended…) and is collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “young couple being photographed at the beach” by phlubdr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘The Days Have Come Unhooked’

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The days have come unhooked from passing time,
its little Brio trucks are off their tracks;
the past and future mix to make their rhyme,
with pieces placed at random in fresh stacks.
Clear memories blend their present, future, past.
The days stretch out, and yet the months fly by –
you turn in circles, facing first, not last.
As childhood deepens, old age pools go dry.
Behind its smoke and mirrors, whores and pimps,
its harshly lovely playful attitude,
reality is thinning – you now glimpse
an indescribable infinitude.
The game is won – your enemies are no more,
yet you don’t end it while you max your score.

*****

Published in the Spring 2024 issue of The Road Not Taken.

Photo: “Brio freight train set” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Helena Nelson, ‘Dream’

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I found myself in bed with an old man.
His beard was silvery, his scrawny chest
a rack of ribs, his loose-lipped mouth open
and toothless as a baby. There he was,
there in our bed, as if he owned the place.
He snored and grunted like some ancient king
asleep after a banquet. But what feast
had led, dear heart, to this? What partying?
He turned his head to me. I saw his face—
a travesty. Some metamorphosis
had happened in our sleep, my love replaced
by a bag of windy bones. I need a piss,
he muttered, and got up. O then I knew
what age had done to us, and who was who.

*****

Helena Nelson writes: “Everyone experiences it eventually. You glance at your own reflection in the mirror and get a shock at how old you look. So that’s one of inspirations for this poem. The other spur to write this was a dream I had one night, though in the poem it’s intentionally unclear whether the experience is or isn’t real. I started with near rhymes in the octet and moved towards perfect rhyme at the end to convey the shock. I do hope the reader feels that shock at the end.”

‘Dream’ was originally published in The Dark Horse.

Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems, one of which appears in the Potcake Chapbook, ‘Lost Love’. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.

Short verse: Susan McLean, ‘Jeopardy’

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The first thing she requests post-surgery,
awake but drifting in the morphine glow,
is that my sister turn on the TV
so that the two can watch her favorite show.
Weak but alive, unsure if she has cancer,
my mother turns to questions she can answer.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I wrote this poem while I was over a thousand miles away from the scene it describes, based on my sister’s phone account of what happened. The irony of the show’s title under the circumstances was the first stimulus for the poem, but also I almost laughed when I thought of how characteristic my mother’s action was. Given that she was in her eighties when she had major surgery, my mother’s jeopardy was very real, and I wrote the poem while we still didn’t know whether she had cancer. She did not. There is another irony, in that the game show Jeopardy! provides answers for which the contestants have to supply the appropriate questions. Yet, in context, those questions are answers.
The hardest challenge when writing about an emotional situation is to focus on the facts and let the emotions emerge by suggestion. A hint of humor acts as a counterweight to unspoken anxieties. The poem was first published in Measure and later appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Photo: “Filming Jeopardy!” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Brian Gavin, ‘Death Watch at the Nursing Home’

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Two rows of heads puffed white for show
are turned to watch the gurney go
parade-like down the hall and through
the double doors, and out of view.

They linger, as the swinging doors
are gazed to stillness, and intercourse
is but the mingling of silhouettes.
Beyond the tumults of regret

and wonder, they are elsewhere, all
their architecture of recall
connecting lives to family plots,
or maybe – further back – in what

may be a keepsake memory – light
parade, perhaps – a child’s delight
in clowns and cotton candy, high
and wispy as puffed hair. Friends die

often, but not in violence –
not here, where death comes to the sense
in not-quite-joy, and not-quite-grief,
but trembling, lightly, like a leaf

that might be blown, or not, or light
as dandelion fields puffed white
and wispy, wavering. In slow surmise
they gaze on quiet with quiet eyes,

filling the hall with noiselessness,
and dreaming but to acquiesce
to dream, and but to linger some
in thrall to stillness yet to come.

*****

Brian Gavin writes: “My poem sort of rips off (shamelessly!) the form and rhyme scheme of the famous A E Housman poem ‘To An Athlete Dying Young‘. It is, however, about a different kind of death – extreme old age – and the gentleness of it. It’s based on something I actually saw in a nursing home, when white heads once leaned out of their rooms to see a friend taken away on a gurney. The image of a parade struck me, and the heads of puffed white hair reminded me of cotton candy at the parades of my youth. Eventually the images of puffed hair and puffed candy morphed into a field of puffed white dandelions wavering in the wind.
I almost left the title at ‘Death Watch‘ – which I kind of preferred for the double meaning – but opted to add the rest of it for the sake of clarity. This piece ran in my collection Burial Grounds.”

Brian Gavin is a retired Distribution Manager who started writing poetry 10 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, Peninsula Poets and Snakeskin Magazine, and in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes’. He lives in Lakeport, Michigan, USA, with his wife Karen. ‘Burial Grounds’ is available from Kelsay Books.
You can see more of his work at briangavinpoetry.com

Photo: “Dandelions Gone to seed, Dandelion puff ball seeds weeds lawn infestation roundup herbicide Pics by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube #Dandelions #Weeds #DandelionSeeds #Lawn #DandelionFlowers #Dandelion” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘The Mirror’s Desolation’

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Once you adored me. I would bask
in looks you saved for me alone,
giving no hint—if any ask—
of secrets only I have known.
But now you find me hard to face.
I care for you too much to lie,
copying lines you would erase.
You hurry past, head down, and I,
sensing your pained indignity,
return your look of mute distress.
Though you no longer cherish me,
I do not love you any less.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I took the idea of a talking mirror from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mirror,’ but whereas she presents the mirror as being totally dispassionate, my mirror reflects the emotions as well as the faces of those who look into it. Sometimes, if you see someone beautiful, you may think “the mirror loves her (or him).” But it occurred to me that mirrors love everyone. They just as gladly reflect the old and ugly as the young and beautiful. In this poem, I imagine the mirror’s sorrow that its love is not returned. In French, “I’m sorry” is “je suis désolé” (“I’m desolated”), which always seemed charmingly over-the-top to me. It occurred to me that the phrase “the mirror’s desolation” could refer both to the sorrow the mirror feels and to the devastation it causes. This poem first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and then in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

Illustration: DALL-E

Odd poem: William Faulkner, ‘After Fifty Years’

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Her house is empty and her heart is old,
And filled with shades and echoes that deceive
No one save her, for still she tries to weave
With blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold.
Once all men’s arms rose up to her, ‘tis told,
And hovered like white birds for her caress:
A crown she could have had to bind each tress
Of hair, and her sweet arms the Witches’ Gold.

Her mirrors know her witnesses, for there
She rose in dreams from other dreams that lent
Her softness as she stood, crowned with soft hair.
And with his bound heart and his young eyes bent
And blind, he feels her presence like shed scent,
Holding him body and life within its snare.

William Faulkner began writing poetry at an early age; and in his late 20s he published his first book, a collection of poems titled ‘The Marble Faun’. Though much of the fiction for which he won the 1949 Nobel Prize carries a heavy southern accent or is written in stream of consciousness, it is engaging to see that he could be meditative in the iambic pentameter of a regular sonnet if he chose.

Photo: “William Faulkner’s Typewriter 2” by visitmississippi is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Maryann Corbett, “Dutch Elm”

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Maryann Corbett

That trees would die
yearly, we knew. The columns of the nave
of Summit Avenue, the architrave
of openwork where canopies unfold,
green or briefly gold,
the arched, leaf-dripping limbs
backlit with sky—

in every year, some go.
Some ends arrive with force: the papers warn
with pictures, after every storm,
of fallen branches, hollow at the heart,
or great trunks snapped apart,
battering cars and houses with the blows.
(We knew, but now we know.)

Some ends are quiet: the red
stripes appearing, like a garotting wound,
on trunks where the inspectors found
beetles in bark, bare limbs lurking in shade.
The tree crew and the chainsaw blade
will come—we know now—soon—
The stripe says, This is dead.

They make short work of things
with sweat and cherry pickers, saws and zeal
rope and rappelling acrobatic skill
and limb-shredding machines.
Only the stump remains
and is soon sawdust: nothing left to chance
but next year’s fairy rings.

No help for it, then.
This cut to sky, this coring of the heart.
These trees too far apart.
This just delivered balled-and-burlapped stick,
its trunk two inches thick,
decades from beauty. What we always knew:
We start again.

Maryann Corbett writes: “All day today I’ve been hearing, and sometimes watching, the process of the removal of my neighbor’s enormous elm, which peeled apart suddenly in a recent storm, exposing a hollow core. I was reminded that I’ve seen this process so many times in my city that it prompted a poem over a decade ago, and it’s a poem I’m happy to remember. It first appeared in The Lyric and is included in my second book, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creating of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks, five full-length collections already published, and a forthcoming book. Her fifth book, In Code, contains the poems about her years with the Revisor’s Office. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Her web page: maryanncorbett.com

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