PICNICS

(November 14, 2003)

like an expiration date on bacon or bread,

I have one more day in the decade of my forties,

and while I confess the fiction of chronology

composed by clocks and calendars, the imposition

of time as linear like a ladder, I can’t dispel

the relentless realization: in a day I will be old

at least much older than I am now, will wake up

on Saturday (for the first time I see weekend

as weakened) and notice how almost everyone

is young, younger than me, how, unless I am

a statistical anomaly, I will not live another

fifty years, perhaps another decade or two or three,

which today with the sun chasing shadows in early

winter light during a long run around the curve

of York Harbour will simply not be enough

I don’t know what eternity holds, what aftertaste

of earth will linger at the back of the heart, but I am

in no hurry to find out, since on this day I am teased

to distraction with the light I see everywhere,

need nothing more than eager licks of the earth

always greedy for more picnics, even as a teen,

I used the resources of high school mathematics

to compute the irrefutable conclusion that eating up

an annual average of fifty picnics, I would still

devour only three and a half thousand in a typical

biblical lifetime, and knew with unassailable certainty,

even then, that wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough

like Emily Dickinson, I know for sure only,

Too few the mornings be, Too scant the nights,

and I wonder if Emily savoured many picnics,

probably not, since I don’t think she went out

much, or was that Emily Bronte? oh the waste

of getting old! after a lifetime of rehearsing

for Jeopardy (cramming my cheeks with facts

like a neurotic squirrel), everything is now

jumbled up like jambalaya, and all the facts

are so much mouldy manna that will not sustain

me in the long winter without picnics

and writing this poem about growing old and longing

for picnics (even though every sensible husband knows

I should be helping Lana prepare for the birthday party

tomorrow) is a sign I sing to ward off the murky

monsters under my bed, including loss and lumbago,

congestion and indigestion, headaches and heartaches,

violet varicose veins like a map of violent places

I have travelled, grateful and glad Anna sent me

Walter the Farting Dog to remind me I am still loved