Age erodes.
Pushing the hairline.
An unrelenting
wave beating at the brow.
Gums pull upward
exposing coffee-stained
roots.
You can count the lines
like rings in a tree.
Skin slackens.
Gravity pulling it
forever closer
to the earth.
Knowing this,
Standing in a room
full of smooth, blank faces
Thirty-Two might as well
be One Hundred.
3 comments:
long in the tooth.
Sometimes my students make me feel freakin old. Plus I have a birthday on the horizon.
I like the last stanza a lot. "Standing in a room full of smooth, blank faces..." Made me think about the fact that their faces are smooth and blank not only because of their numerical age, but the age of their maturity. Wrinkles on one's face tell much more than just their age, but what they've been through. The wrinkles on a person's face are like a road map of their journey through life.
I get to deal with students that were born after I graduated from high school. Next year the kids will be born in 2000. That makes me feel old. The gravity line is great and their blank faces is too as Peter explains above. I'm a little thrown off rings in a tree line. It works, but seems out of place.
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