I can barely focus on "Song of Myself"
for the rattle of trucks up Route 9
headed for Walmart, accelerating gloriously
 
in exactly the American tune Whitman
would have wanted, full of stink
and clank, two men on a loading dock
 
sharing a cigarette and talking shit
between deliveries, the truck driver
with his elbow out the window
 
singing along to the country station,
and a lone cardinal in our maple
narrating the story as he understands it,
 
a tale more about wind currents
and the flash of a cat tail around 
the corner of the garage than about
 
any load of charcoal briquettes 
making its way between greening fields
and towns waking warily from winter.
                        

He's eighty-four this year, a bit rickety,
but still with all his marbles and his eyes
at least OK. So what else to do but what 
he's always done? Main difference now
is he takes a seat and lets the crowd
come to him. It's an easy bunch: all
he needs to do is drop a damn or shit
every now and then, and everyone 
smiles— such feistiness at his age!
 
That should disgust him but somehow 
doesn't. His paintings haven't changed
in sixty years—gorgeous nudes afloat
on rivers of garbage, old tires, dumpsters
brimming, road kill and rusted car parts.
Sometimes huge, wall-filling panoramas,
but more often small ones lately. 
He has trouble these days with ladders
and scaffolds. No one seems to mind.
 
So he swims in talk of his practiced eye,
his ease. But is it mostly habit by now,
a private itch abundantly scratched?
He hardly knows himself anymore,
which is strange—why not grow smarter
with age? He'd had every intention 
of doing that. Every nude woman 
he paints, though he does his best
to vary and disguise it, remains 
his first wife as she looked in about 1965. 
 
His youngest daughter fetches him
some wine, a glass of Pinot Grigio 
he's fairly sure she's watered down
as much as she dares. Well, she's a 
good girl, though gray-faced and oddly 
weary—older than her mother in all these 
paintings, he thinks, then smiles for real
for the first time today.