Approaching Sixty
There seems to be a speed bump
in terms of years, slowing me down
to an ambling pace and the young men
just get younger and the old men
just get older and I seem to suspend
disbelief that I am almost at retirement,
retiring from what to what I
still don’t know. My body seems almost
implausibly the same, give or take
a few new ailments, blemishes and
marks corroborating my age. A few
more pounds, a widened girth,
a sense of gravity as in gravitas,
an uneven passion that comes
and goes, a faulty memory which ebbs
and flows with tales of embellishment
and disillusion. The old hurts occasionally
reviewed are brought out and polished
with guilty deeds and with wasted work
or words. Accustomed to feeling almost useless
except in the service of preserving the past
(which by the way, never lasts). Thinning hair
to almost bald, that wasted field seems almost bare,
compounding the fact that life’s not fair,
saluting that well known platitude that when
the mind’s ready the body’s not.
—Walter Holland
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Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry Circuit (2010), Transatlantic (2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (1992) as well as a novel, The March (2011). His short stories have been published in Art and Understanding, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and Rebel Yell, Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Art and Understanding, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, The Cream City Review, Found Object, Pegasus, Phoebe, Between: New Gay Poetry, and Poets for Life:76 Poets Respond to AIDS. He lives in New York City.