Aging as a Spiritual Practice

A Poem by Robert Ronnow

Beautiful summer day. You know you're gonna die
that's why you know no joy

unless religion, tv, stories, sports matter.
For men like us dying's easy, it's living that's hard.
And since dying's much like living, that's hard too.

There's some contentment in letting community decide
your place in it. A good day to die, the Apaches say.

Can't stop the quince from blossoming
or my sons from smoking, speeding.

The best that can be done or said's a blessing.

Less tv, less guessing about the effects of your anger
unless you want to be an angry man forever.
Becoming knowledgeable is the best defense
against your insignificance. OK about being alone.

Alive, almost sure of it. Whether I'm a visitor
to my life or the actual owner.

Mature poets steal, most are masturbators.

There are a million poets, I'm poet #500K.
Plenty of mysteries, infinite philosophies,

prayers, laws and unwritten rules.

That's why we go to school, life's complicated.

All I do not know: ATP, probabilities,

the glorious revolution, meiosis and mitosis
and all I'll never see, the bottom of the ocean,
the palm at the end of the mind, a wolverine.

Forget-me-not, is that all I want?
To get lucky, you gotta be careful first.

To be great, you gotta be willing to sound BAD.

In last night’s movie, a young writer

and an older, married with children French woman

fall in love. They did not meet during a village massacre
and money is no object, Manhattan.
But after everything has happened
she cannot leave her children, not even for love,
because of love, the love that brooks no serendipity.

In the subsequent late night movie, a wealthy
altruistic doctor arranges for the murder

of his neurotic concubine. His guilt
provides us with an opportunity to consider
the concepts of faith and forgiveness,
that all will be well in the end
after a period of meaningless suffering.