^{—on my seventy-ninth birthday}

Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries. 
In the secrecy of my room 
I would not admit I cared 
that my friends were given parties. 
Before I left town for school 
my birthday went up in smoke 
in a fire at City Hall that gutted 
the Department of Vital Statistics. 
If it weren’t for a census report 
of a five-year-old White Male 
sharing my mother’s address 
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester 
I’d have no documentary proof 
that I exist. You are the first, 
my dear, to bully me 
into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear 
an abstracted look that drives you 
up the wall, as though it signified 
distress or disaffection. 
Don’t take it so to heart. 
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much 
as being who I am. Maybe 
it’s time for me to practice 
growing old. The way I look 
at it, I’m passing through a phase: 
gradually I’m changing to a word. 
Whatever you choose to claim 
of me is always yours; 
nothing is truly mine 
except my name. I only 
borrowed this dust.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.