stumbling towards profundity

When I am eighty I will live alone and smoke a pipe and read my news and books as the sun comes up. I will garden and split wood and walk to watch the salmon because there will, of course, be salmon nearby and wood in need of splitting and, I would imagine, we will still have weeds.

When I am eighty I will move slowly and think fast and never have to drive anywhere. I will write poems when the muse is upon me about old friends fallen by the wayside and drink red wine in my flower garden amidst the graves of a hundred cats.

When i am eighty i will hurl epithets at young hoodlums on street corners because it is my right and my duty and my retribution. My daughters and I will stroll and talk of things large and small and here and gone as my four-score worth of leaves swirl about our feet.

When I am eighty my girls will perhaps be grandparents, maybe twice over, and the world will be a realm unimaginable through today’s lens, a world we walk through with barely a thought thrown back to these days, these humble, lonely beginnings.

When I am eighty I will worry about everything and nothing all at once. I will live in an old lighthouse overlloking the Pacific somewhere and I will light lanterns to guide in wayward travellers and poets and princesses and dragons alike, to whisper to them the secret homes of rocks and danger.

When I am eighty I will play the piano each night while the sun burns down into the ocean. I will stretch up to pluck apples from the tired old tree, whose limbs are younger than my own. I will lie on my back in whatever yard I have to speak or write of and gaze up at the same stars I spy upon tonight, thinking some of the same thoughts, living parts of the same life I’ve always led

wondering
wondering
wandering