Impromptu

Dancing 'round the kitchen with the spindly ladies while the green
blog notebook lies shunned in my bag,
Lunch Club day with mince, sausages, potatoes I mashed, Coffee
Morning people hanging around and beans from a tin can,
Colorful aprons and ladies making salads, cheerful welcome to the
regulars from the market outside, the drop-in church members,
Old folks coming soon, the way we serve them, provide a cheap meal
and a place to be, most having nothing else to do,
The way they relate to Ryan and me the warm but one-sided way of a
pensioner with a grandchild.

The green book, my soul, crying out muffled like the devolving agony
of wool clothes in a dryer,
The atrophy of it, plate by plate, the conversations,
The pleasant sense of life almost complete, of children had,
Dreams done and dusted, like a period of architecture,
Feet on the mantelpiece, the relaxation of having done what you
wanted before your body wouldn't let you do it,
A sense of relaxation far from myself, almost subcontinental,
difficult to understand without seeing it in the flesh,
A pleasantness I cannot relate to, whose language I cannot speak.

And yet the wisdom of a well-furrowed brow, the capacity of old
smile lines to love,
If we are the young fighters who determine the course of earth with
our wits like blades and our loins,
In the categorization of old wisdom among the many good-and-ill
pursuits of modern knowledge,
Then let us find where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger
meet and hence find our place,
Though we give great thanks for where we are we've no choice but to
pray, "O Lord, hasten to save",
For the world today is vast like the Fens, drained fertile and flat,
islands becoming towns surrounded by farmland and we can see
everything,
Hasten to save, because finding deep gladness now is like finding one
light against the multitude of stars, feeling alone against the barrage
and the smog and the miry firmament and that is if we have the
courage to open our eyes,
Because I'm trudging as it is, many-leveled and tired, scarcely able to
keep my eyes open to reality,
Preferring instead my imagination--what it is they must see--finally
from their linear home at the end of the world:
The constellations, so crisp in hindsight, set across the inky night sky
with peremptoriness.