The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools, / To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose / It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, / And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember / Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose, / They could alter things back to when they danced all night, / Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September? / Or do they fancy there’s really been no change, / And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight, / Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming / Watching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange: / Why aren’t they screaming? // At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true: / We had it before, but then it was going to end, / And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour / To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower / Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend / There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs: / Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power / Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it: / Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines — / How can they ignore it? // Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms / Inside your head, and people in them, acting. / People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms / Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, / Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting / A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only / The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, / The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s / Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely / Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: / Not here and now, but where all happened once. / This is why they give // An air of baffled absence, trying to be there / Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving / Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear / Of taken breath, and them crouching below / Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving / How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet: / The peak that stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground. Can they never tell / What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night? / Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout / The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well, / We shall find out.