My birthday’s coming up.

Once upon a time, charmed by Yeats’s “When you are old and gray and full of sleep….” I wrote a poem imitating his form called “A Note to My Old Age.” So…am I there yet? Checking the description in my poem, I’d say no. Emphatically no. My note to myself will have to wait.

On the other hand, my poem “Advice to a Younger Woman” still holds up. Published in the Helicon Nine Reader, and also in a couple of my personal collections, it’s about the possibility of starting over. Clean slate. New life. Thirty or forty years after the events that figured in that poem, I’m sure that starting over can happen–over and over again.

Perhaps the capacity to start over was programmed into my personality when I was a child, a military dependent. We moved a lot. My early life was always about anticipating the next thing and letting go of the last. I know other people cherish the memory of growing up in one place and the lifelong ties that sustain them. For me, it’s the energy of change, a continual motion forward in time. Which is better? How could anyone know? You got what you got.

However, if you’re lucky, if you’re listening, if you’re me, sometimes you can move into someone else’s memories, and feel embraced by good old days you never had.
 

RETURNING TO THE ISLAND
 

These are the trees we hang the hammock on.
There is the spot where Billy caught a pike.
The hearth that our father fitted stone by stone.
The smoky old lamp our mother used to like.
 

Here are the chairs, no two of any kind.
The model boat with its musty sail half-mast.
There are the tools and nails we left behind
to fix the neglect from summer seasons past.
 

Somewhere we’ll find the coffee, matches, keys.
Everywhere, mice will show us where they’ve been.
Under no nearer, wiser stars than these,
everything dies, and something grows again.
  
Barbara Loots
Mezzo Cammin 2011