Clap hands for a more youthful reflection

I’m trying to get my old men/sad men poems posted before the end of January—I got waylaid by a broken laptop and a too-long repair job (truly the techno-dog ate my homework)—so to keep things moving along I’ll post two short poems today and the longer ones by Friday. Then I can say fare-thee-well to the old and move on into February, which is, I know, not the obvious month for a fresh start, but for us procrastinators, a veritable mulligan for new year’s resolutions.

 

(Is there anyone who doesn’t want this January to be over?)

 

 

A strange old man

Stops me

Looking out of my deep mirror.

            —Hitomaro

 

 

I left (er uh, last December) a short poem by the seventh-century Japanese poet Hitomaro in a mirror in the men’s section of Nordstroms Rack. I had to slip it into a Michael Kors tie because I didn’t have tape. Notice how creased this poem is. It was one of the first poems I collected when I started Poem Elf nearly ten years ago. My plan was to have one of the men in my life leave it in a public restroom but I never found a volunteer.

 

Maybe I’ve kept it so long because I feel tender towards it. And respectful, the way one would feel about a pocket watch handed down from a great-grandfather long dead. The poem is a deep mirror itself and one I’ve never tired of looking at.

 

Little is known about Hitomaro’s life. He wrote for emperors and died around age fifty. So let’s assume he was in his forties when he wrote about the strange old man in the mirror. You’re still so young! I want to tell him, but I suppose the forties are the decade when bodily decline first surprises and shocks.

 

I’m pairing Hitomaro’s tanka with an excerpt from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing

            —W.B. Yeats

 

Excerpts are unfair to poems—it’s like showing a single buttock from a Rodin sculpture and saying, Look at this man think! But here it is, another piece of paper I’ve been carrying around for years and want to discharge.

 

Take a minute to read the whole poem, a rumination on aging and a celebration of creativity as an antidote. That’s how I read it anyway. Here’s what Yeats wrote about it (courtesy of Wikipedia):

I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.^[1]

 

I left the excerpt in a parking lot at dusk in early December. I’m enjoying how the light and the poem transform a prosaic suburban strip mall into a jeweled and transcendent space.

 

Yeats is ever my favorite. Link here to an earlier post with his biography.