Cassidy’s Corner | These Evening Bodies That We Wear

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
Coral Tree In-home Care provides caregivers, old-fashioned kindness, and neighborly support to older adults who want to live at own home safely, comfortably, and as independently as possible. Since 2010 we’ve helped more than 350 families in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Newport Coast, and neighboring Southern California communities live safer, happier lives.
Poetry Rx | “My Heart Can Take on Any Form” by Ibn Arabi
My heart can take on any form: A meadow for gazelles, A cloister for monks, For the idols, sacred ground, Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim, The tables of the Torah, The scrolls of the Quran. My creed is Love; Wherever its caravan turns along the way, That is my belief,...
A Care Conversation with Cassidy
My mom, Cassidy, is the soul of our family business. Sensitive and interested in every one she meets, she’s easy to talk to and has a knack for drawing out people’s stories: a writer by nature, she sees the story in everyone.
Poetry Rx | “Affirmation” by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a […]
Wisdom | Impermanence Is the Source of All Continuity By Lin Jensen
Mighty or Not, We All Fall Down By Lin Jensen Published on LionsRoar.com, March 8, 2012 The first I saw of the oak were its raw roots crusted with mud and tilted up into the air so that the whole root ball projected six or eight feet above my head. It was a massive valley […]
Wisdom | The Dalai Lama’s Perspective on Aging
Featured image: The Dalai Lama visits a patient at Westmead Hospital in Sydney in 2013. Photo Rusty Stewart/Dalai Lama in Australia (DLIA). In April 2013 the Dalai Lama met scientists at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland to participate in a conference on...
0 Comments