Past Seventy-Six

 2025

Am I as old as I think I am?

I think I’m seventy-six 

but time can tip us 

one way or another

and turn us inside out.

Just yesterday I was twelve

and I’m still in the same body.

Aging separates us 

from imaginative reality 

leaving us in the realm

of wishful thinking and envy.

It happens imperceptibly 

and progressively 

while doing what we thought

we were supposed to be doing.

It’s not too late to look past the numb 

and blunted world into those things 

that are eternal, beautiful, and magical,

to reverse our downward slide,

to return to our natural sense

of imaginative reality,

to speak in thunder,

to write in dreams,

to wander with 

sacred intent.

From: A Preface To The Universe:

Women, Getting Older, and Other Mysteries

Unpub. MS p. 34

Pens Rule

Today jumped over yesterday

so I don’t know where I am.

I’m missing the punctuation,

and yesterday is on the prowl,

looking for its sense of time.

Yesterday asked me if I lived alone

and I said, No, I live with time and place.

As the day went on, I got lost

in what sense I was writing.

Probably the past sense.

Sometimes there are no rules, I was reminded.

The present sense has remained full of its rules

and I want to break them all.

Can I say that a fire burns in my pens?

Or am I thinking in some other sense?

From: Dreams, Shaky Memories, 

& Stumbling Into A Wilderness

Unpub. MS p. 28

Sacred Realm

Nature is a sacred realm. Lightning strikes where 

it needs to. Nature knows how to make her point. 

There are a hundred paths in your eyes. 

Each one can take you to the Divine Presence.

Age is upon me, but I am not frightened by that. 

More than ever, I crave the essence of all things.

One night the grasslands awakened me, No one 

has seen such trumpery grip the throat of a nation.

I meditate and remember my blessings. 

It’s the righteous mobs that terrify me. 

From: A Rambly Search For Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpub MS p. 4

What A Time It Was

It could be The Beatles or Beethoven,

the music I remember most,

from places and time,

memories becoming vaguely familiar strangers,

not so much the reality of the time

but some form of what that reality was, 

continually stretched, compressed, broken,

and reassembled in creative and  

sometimes startling ways,

floating somewhere around

how it really was (now long gone),

how I remember it,

and how I wish it had been.