Age

Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

From An Essay on Man: Epistle I  by Alexander Pope

Age

The windows on the western side of the house
leak cold like a giant antiseptic swab
pressed to my exposed neck and fingers
while I sit looking out at the grass
mottled green and white on the second day of spring.

You said you had been thinking
about me and I believe you
even though it does not make me
feel alive to know it anymore.

It is the first day I have felt old to think of us
how you, when clean-shaven for war
would change into a boyish thing with different aim
and I, who loved you so unfairly
reduced myself to make more room for you.

I do not have anything left
to give you.
Not emotion, no tears or prayers
not the weight off of my body, or time.

Hope, it turns out, is a perennial
that does not always bloom the same way.