Is everything new about getting old? Spring  
and the melting snow, friends dropping away—
they sift underground, or washed by the wind 
they circle the earth. Their names like chalk on
a blackboard pose the daunting equation of loss.  

Yesterday I biked past the old beer and gun club, 
rechristened “Hogwarts,” to the edge of the slough 
where it joins the big river. No bridge for miles 
but a flagpole with pennants to summon 
a boat when somebody needs to cross. 

These blustery afternoons, deceptive in their 	
beauty—bright hopes leading us on. Fish camp 
and then a hundred empty miles to the range 
where mountains like grandparents lounging 
on hammocks span the horizon. Clouds 

like winged lions—Assyrian. Is heaven open 
for business on days like this? And cycling back, 
a bull moose browsing the roadside willows 
turns his head and stares. He’s like that difficult cousin 
you can’t help liking despite his prickly ways. 

Brain circuits, axon and synapse, maybe
we’ve got it all wrong, like those late night 
sophomore sessions when a light went on	
and suddenly everything changed. Are we 
our physical bodies? Are we anything else?

If the body’s a river distilling the years,
then a time-lapse camera could track this life, 
recording the snowballing wisps of decay, sloughed 	
skin and hair, like mayflies flitting, having their day, 
while the waistline spreads like a delta toward the sea. 

It leaves a glow, a whisper, a caress. Remember 
that dusty floor we slept on before we owned 
a bed? “But why do they call it sleeping?” you said. 
Still there’s a pungence to this breeze, a whiff of bliss.      
Is heaven open for business on days like this?
                        

He scores deep lines in my face, the ditches 
I abhor, then brightens the blue and speckles 

the whites of my eyes. He twists my aging lips 
in a sardonic grin. “Don’t sit so still,” 

he tells me, “it’s a lie.” Compliant, I take 
out my pocket notebook, and begin 

by noting how his hair in crimson knots 
falls to the right and shows some scalp. 

His apron’s full of random strokes—the reds, 
the greens, ochre, and indigo of spattered paint

and where he’s wiped his brush—which now 
he lays aside. His fingers lick dried blood. 

A violent sensitive man who drinks a tun 
a month and has the shakes. His visions of 

the fires of hell absolve him for the flashy whores 
he loves. My temperament is not like his. 

My second thoughts are milder than my first
and then I think again. He laughs and spits 

and tells me to sit still—“Jackass, hold your pose!”— 
takes up a knife and scrapes away my nose.
                        

A sun-swirl, egg-over-easy, with a swatch 
of rainbow colors left and right 
as the day-long winter evening fades,
Orion riding shotgun on the night.

But driving isn’t easy on the ice,
and up a snow-packed hill the engine falters.
I back up blindly, landing in a snow-berm 
with a jolt. Shaken, breathing deep,
I’m taken by an old refrain: how beauty
is allied with pain. 
	                  The moon’s a flower 
through a cage of spruce. Stars seed the night.
And soon a passing stranger stops
and frees me with a push—they usually do.

I shoot the hill again in second gear, 
but when I rush the turn—default—
an unfamiliar driveway brings me to a cabin 
where a sign warns: 
		       “Killer Kats—Beware!”
I shout, “Hello?”…“Hello?” 
The radio’s tuned to folk but no one’s home.

So backing slowly down the drive 
I try the other fork… 
			  bright lights, 
a barking dog and voices, candles 
flaming on a tree (our hostess guards 
it with a pewter candle snuffer), as, 
perplexed at how the north’s adopted me,  
I place my cooling moose stew on the board.