Middle age

As my 38th birthday just passed -- I literally had to do the math to figure out my age! -- I find myself firmly in the reality of middle age.  There isn't really any sorrow about that, just a placid acknowledgement that I'm in a different era, one in which cares are carried a little more heavily and sunsets a little harder to notice.  In my youth I thought a lot about middle age and what I wanted to be like -- and wanted to avoid -- when I got there.  There is a unique blindness to middle age, and I didn't want to forget the things in life that were worth being passionate about -- things that youth knows and old age remembers, but middle age, with all its responsibilities and daily burdens, finds very hard to see.  

I remembered this poem I wrote in my youth.

Jesus, Stay

When

like a werewolf

I wake

and ache for moonlight

it’s Your gentle voice

that holds me back

like a loving hand on my arm

to stay me

Then fades the night

and all moon-madness

is gone in the day

but You are there

You stay

When go the golds, and gleaming greens,

and chamelion hues that tease my vision

with what seems like always-life,

when desire and distaste

mutate with the seasons,

and both drabs and brights do fail,

Jesus, You are the color that stays

Jesus, You stay

When with the years

my young desires 

burn out of my body

dry out on the skin

and fall like reptile scales

away

Jesus, may hunger for You still stay

and may the milder bands of middle age

snap and shrivel into senility

around the ever-burning core

of You

who stay

When death dispatches me

beyond the circumference of life

that is all I know,

With me

Jesus, stay

August 23, 2000