Intimations at Age Sixty

Dreams increasingly darken, night by night, but is it a propensity of age

or still something disagreeable eaten right before bed?

Perhaps as usual it is just a matter of the late A.M. time and lack of imagination

for the sky has closed its all-over curfew drapes.  

Yes, how dusky visions begin with that sense of the familiar unfamiliar

in settings and beings all having something of the mundane going overboard

like exam-panic cliché. 

Find the right room but the numbers keep shifting to blanks or hieroglyphics

as halls of doors become old rotaries or push-button phones twisting to the tumblers

of combinations on school lockers, or is it a gym's, now a bus station's

& the platform anyway, is crazy with jostling as shoppers fill aisles

for a mall appears from this, Specials on groceries, only the coupons keep expiring

& the lanes go from slow motion to speeding out of reach though it makes little difference

since every way of past gainful employment has been thrown into the mix -

this shopping cart now a nursing home's bed, bumpity-bump, with wheels

off axle as the patient slides out into files of cabinets already spitting forms

like shredders exploding & anyone can get the gist that the body is squeezing 

like a toothpaste tube to fit in sudden twists of dimension calling for claustrophobic crawling 

& now a slide's swoosh to make that jump, cliff to steppe, mud to gravel pit

with streets streaming off and no fares in pockets as air itself atomizes,

condensing blackness that is space gradually endlessly without light,

though passing figures in outlines enough compress, then drift

as if touch or its absence bares some memories of enough muzzy rays still

before all else is enveloped & waking is a crash of driftwood broken out of

to splash amid sheets twisted with sweat.

But did awakening really happen for now death shows up here like a sort of jogger

in black jeans, a gray sweat jacket, the hood pulled up & death's face is the knitted grid

of a fencer's screen, silvery with silence & not half bad as all that 

with a certain agile cat slenderness of knee bent on knee, ankle slightly jiggling

with a little impatience as if waiting for a cup of good Joe, waiting for who to show up

from all those similar shut houses of drawn blinds from prying eyes

taking inventory, taking stock of life's particular recipe box & scarcely closable lid

of handwritten index cards from the matrilineal line matching labels on jam jars, 

pickling, even freezer packets whose creators once asked -

How could we have made love so gloriously & not be immortal?  

Why were the Gods so cruel & capricious to dash us in the spice rack,

the powders of mines, for slave trade, for commerce,

when everyone wants their stories to be told, their lives to have meaning,

everyone milling, dust to dust, in the dream machine realms of this age or that?

---

Resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, Stephen Mead has intermittently been submitting work for publication going on four decades. He remains grateful to all of the editors who have given his work a good home as now, retired from his day job, he is busy trying to sell his 40-year backlog of art that you can view here.