aging

Aging

Is aging is the length of time it takes

to get from the belfry of your own heart

to its very threshing floor (or is it

the other way ‘round?) to find

the fix there?

Is it’s height, the measure

of stacked bales or casks, that each year

are a thicker pick

                                (if the crop’s been good)

and it’s depth, a darker stilling

                                (if the sugar’s sweet-bitter

                                rock gone sand-granular)?

Could be too those lean times, a scale-rusting

empty sack times, are lips pouting

out of the pile flaccid and gray and waiting

like any two year old baby to be inflated

with praise and a hand up after a fall. 

Or it could be too that the measure of all

of this is the brain unfurling its fist

slowly, after impact, after blast trauma, after

soaking it all in like charred oak barrels do to

draw the whiskey  (and then later, decades,

the wine…) the liquor that stores it

in the cooling barn of your maturity.  And from

time to time don't we uncork it and damn

does that dram go down slow as liquid

gold and doesn’t it guild every agony

every pain every delirious joy

it was distilled from.  Every fall,

when the crop’s come in, and the choices

are made about the grain

                each to their grade 

                fire and dry

                each to their crush or grind

                will either come to this amber

                sap of resined life  
                or will go to the miller
                to rub between two wheels
                high-polished as a fairy mirror
                

                or will go to the silage
                to be poked about and through

                by the noses and bare toes

                of rats who are so so much

                like our own at times

                they don’t know, being blind,

                it’s worth they’re shitting on

                precious worth scattered

                on the threshold floor, worth

                we can only see from the precipice

                of our crumbling aging belfry.