The tale I am hearing is all too nicey-nicey
Why is everybody crying?
And they keep telling each other that they love each other
as if this somehow were news,
or a message from the gods 
 
My mother and I never once in our lives said 
‘I love you’
I never used that word, not once in my young life 
     spoke the word aloud  
until my high school girl friend positively made me say it 
(on pain of not getting any)
Say You Love Me
Why?
Just say it. Or I’m going…
 
I never told my father anything 
The word ‘love’ surely never arose in any single conversation 
in our lives together, 
in part because we never had any conversations
such as those I read in the tales of others 
My parents never talked to each other either 
(not about anything beyond present exigencies), 
at least in the presence of younger ears  
 
I just can’t do all this warm emotional expressiveness 
And – crying?
Now that I am old I cry all the time – at movies, at the TV,
over lyrics penned two centuries ago, 
and though nobody ever makes any kind of deal about 
what I do,
the folks in the tale I’m hearing, both hale and hearty – and young –
keep breaking down 
over practically nothing, 
which somehow bothers me
 
Oh, to tell the truth, 
Dad and I did have to talk a few times
It was after I banged up his car
Yeah, I did that…
more than once 
                        

Going down is fun, easy even,
the whole forest seemingly our own. 
But what worries me is 
the price I’ll have to pay
on that long uphill.
What do you get when you walk downhill too long?
A comeuppance? 
 
Reassurances suggest themselves:
Getting older is simply
getting younger going backwards.
If you're heading to the end,
you must be getting close to the beginning. 
Finishing the course simply means 
waiting for the next round to begin.
Finishing swiftly means your circles 
are speeding up –
and going around in circles 
is all you need to do.
 
The path is all there is.
                        

They cut down a Paulownia tree, she wrote, 
as if corresponding from a higher address
or a locked closet in my own thoughts: 
‘There was absolutely no need to kill it.’ 
 
In my city (yours too) they cut down trees
on the slightest pretext,
or, op. cit., for no cause at all.
Yet another valediction to forbid mourning 
for the end of the race.
 
I struggle to understand what we are directing 
our higher energies to accomplish.
What was Bach thinking?
Shakespeare, on the surviving evidence, thought about 
property values in the old hometown, 
his daughter's prospects,
a family crest.
 
I think about those I would choose to eliminate,
on evidence available to all. 
Happily no one is offering to make me pasha,
or vizier, or chief of police.
Save my trees,
I would tell them,
but some of these old goats 
are expendable. 

* Jane Miller, “At Home,” London Review of Books. 4 June 2020