Being Senior
Takes a village to finish your sentence,
the condition sentence enough,
word sought jammed between dream
and next sip of dark roast.
Put downs come to mind.
“Carry out, ma’am?” Not there yet,
doesn’t he notice my gym sweats?
“Are you still here?”
Last time I looked!
So many questions at our age. “Just worn cartilage,”
the orthopedist tosses off, lighting up my knee x-ray.
“What’s next?” I ask. “Nothing,” he says.
Last night in the parking lot after the theater,
my friend can’t find her car. “It’s new, all electric,
gray.” She click-clicks her key thing.
I drive her up and down the aisles of cars,
all unresponsive shadows in night’s gloom,
no little red lights blinking “here.”
“Oh,” she remembers with a lurch,
“I parked it on the street.”
Another friend, only weeks ago his children weeping
at his bedside, rose from a near coma.
Laugh!” he ordered with vigor and
sank without ceremony. Dropped away like a petal
I think, his last word etched in memory
as winter wind releases a blizzard of white
from the flowering pear tree, filling every speck of air,
every cranny, every niche, nothing left to say.
(c) Perie Longo
Journal of Poetry Therapy, vol. 30, No. 1, March, 2017.
