Yesterday evening, instead of spring cleaning, I was doing some fall trashing of old magazines that had gathered under tables in dead stacks, a heap of paper. Paging through a few of them, I stopped at the following poem I might have missed before. It read exactly as I felt last night, stiff from sitting, dizzy with a drift of glossy paper. The poet caught my aging body in its October nightdress.

Evening Poem by Alice Oswald

Old scrap-iron foxgloves
rusty rods of the broken woods

what a faded knocked-out stiffness
as if you’d sprung from the horsehair
of a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down there

or at any rate something dropped from a great height
straight through flesh and out the other side
has left your casing pale and loose and finally

just a heap of shoes

they say the gods being so uplifted
can’t really walk on feet but take tottering steps
and lean like this closer and closer to the ground

which gods?

it is the hours on bird-thin legs
the same old choirs of hours
returning their summer clothes to the earth

with the night now
as if dropped from a great height

falling