On the Approach of My Fiftieth Birthday (a poem)

“On the Approach of My Fiftieth Birthday” was written in 2002 and published in the November 2006 issue of Quill & Parchment. I did not think of it as the beginning of a sequence. Then came 2012. And after that 2022. If fate smiles on me, perhaps one or two more lie down the way.

Thanks for bearing with me on the audio. I lost track of how many times I recorded it. This is the best of the lot.

On the approach of my fiftieth birthday,
I teeter on the brink of adulthood
and dubious maturity. 
Disinclined to genuflect before the Dow,
indifferent to possessions, 
but for books and running shoes, 
downwardly mobile
and marginally employed,
I remain at heart
a card-burning member
of the Far Left lunatic fringe. 
I take my stand— 
poet by choice and by chance—
chained to the wings of the sky.
Moonburned my brain cobbles
a lyric of grace. 
A mythics of rebellion adorns
my beat portfolio. 
Rumor and fate tolerate these ruins of rhyme.
I take my stand
with Milton and Blake—
of the Devil’s own party—and know it.

I take my stand, 
my history writ
in the solitude of rented rooms
and the clangor and crush
of bars where I have done time, 
arm in arm with friends
more stranger now to me
than the ones whose names
I do not know.
There on the flickering
silver screen of memory,
we hoist a pint to entropy
and hoist a pint to beauty
and step out to face 
what demon-dog waits us each
at the crossroads
in the deep dark of our night.

I write my history 
to discover my history
in the song and dance of time.
Words faded on delicate pages,
frayed and gray, 
bound by broken spines,
fill the shelves of dimly lit
back basement libraries of the mind
where I roam—a student— 
for the duration.
I write my history.
Dostoevsky at the roulette table is true
as Dostoevsky when he imagines the Grand Inquisitor
and Bukowski at the typer
no more nor less true
than old Hank 
recklessly eyeballing
that college chick
whose eyes are flares
that bathe her face
with a halo of promise
that reveals nothing.

I write my history 
and stand minute before
those sculptures in the garden
au Musée Rodin,
those chunks of bronze
whose eyes are flares 
that bathe insensible stone with breath 
and throw light on the mystery 
that remains always behind everything.

I write my history
in the magic and dark of cinema
when Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson
lose themselves in one another in Persona,
when Baptiste the mime
leaves wife and son behind
and pushes desperately through
the festival crowd and cries 
“Garance! Garance!”
and loses her again,
when Bacall tells Bogart how to whistle,
when young Jeanne Moreau 
races across that bridge
with Jules and Jim in breathless pursuit,
that is my history.
When the children cry out to Alyosha,
“Karamazov, we love you! Hurrah for Karamazov!”
when Rimbaud goes out in the morning
with a look so lost and a face so dead
that perhaps those he passes do not see him,
that is my history.

Memo from the editorial desk. The three lines beginning "when Rimbaud goes out" are adapted from the Louise Varèse translation of “Une saison en enfer” in A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat (1961), New Directions.

Baptiste the mime and Garance are from Marcel Carné’s legendary film Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise). Roger Ebert told the remarkable story of that remarkable film shot in Paris and Nice during the German occupation in the article Children of Paradise published in 2002.

Jeanne Moreau runs across that bridge in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt