Doc looks at me through the frame of her glasses,
asks me if I’m being serious about my question.
I shift, crinkle the paper-lined bench I’m sitting on,
and adjust my smile to match the new tone in the room.

So, I shouldn’t be worried about my memory quite yet?
She says everything looks perfectly normal, and then
in comes the worst phrase she has repeated annually
for the last five or six years, “for a man your age.”
 
The paper lining crinkles again, “I’m really not old enough
for you to use that phrase every time I see you!”
From the audible clenching of my reactionary keister,
she knows her response bothers me to no end. I swear

she has to stifle a laugh, a bent finger to upper lip,
as if to show herself as pensive, not entertained.
Turning 50 never bothered me, it was a fine number.
But 51 had burrowed itself deep, had shortened my fuse,

all because I had assumed it was a prime number.
As if it mattered! I’d dragged myself by my own scruff
Into the closing of my year, somehow not realizing
That 51 is three times seventeen, that I had nothing

about which to be bothered for another two years.
53 will prove a challenge, I am sure. And yet,
Sister André died last week, Earth’s oldest human
At 118 years, a nun, a Frenchwoman, a saint.

How many of her prime years did she spend counting,
calculating and mourning her metered advance?
I imagine she didn’t. She was wise. She was better
oriented in space to allow Time its smooth passage.

Though who really knows? Maybe after living through
thirty prime-numbered ages herself, she had wisely
left behind the sadness, ignored her own doctors
and had simply been happy, for a woman her age.
                        

Once, she was all sauté,
cooked full-flame, blazing rage,
chopped her way, hard sashay,
through day, and days, and age,

until now. We acknowledge
what had so long been—
her life horizon’s nearing edge.
She’s grown so very thin.

So thin, in fact, the light 
behind passes through her,
like the stove’s glow at night
shines orange through tender ear.

Steam rises. Our mother, too,
into the welcoming blue.