At Sixty Nine

At Sixty Nine

She kept her songs, they took so little space

                                                                                Philip Larkin                                       

                                                                                “Love Songs in Age”

Today you would have been sixty

nine.  I break you there

because that’s where you were

when you died.  You’d gotten through

until then though the scythe, if not

your friend, at least your third twin,

swept at your feet like the hem

of crinoline or the pleat of wind

in a dervish skirt.   Always, always your

dying lay quiet at your feet, waiting, 

faithful.

You know, even though I could

spend a good part of my day every day

in dispute with you (though now

especially because the sound

of your voice has never changed

for me), it’s as if nothing else is ever really

still, like records in their slip

cases, how all that sound is

paused and now all we need is speed

and a needle and a couple

of speakers.  Believe me when

I say I don’t think I need to

play a single one.  I’ve kept them

all, I couldn’t turn them out,

and suppose I never would for love

or small bills.  But listen.  Even today

or especially today, the scratch

is still there in the air, the crack of static

settled in the worn grooves

of my temporal lobe.  The needle’s blunt

but there’s another sharper tool on the roof

of your mouth, going cold as you go

cold, losing it the way bowels are lost

in the end, and then how they settle against

the pelvis like the cradle it is

and like the baby you began as sixty

nine years ago.  Listen.  The tension’s

blown out like light, and now not so much

blown out as gone too low, how the way

fuel in the globe coats the tongue of wick

and even as we spoke our least real

words nearly two years before you

died the edges were gone dry, were flying

off and if not flying then drifting

and if not drifting than hovering

like that fire between us in the lamps,

you know, when the power went out

how we heard the hissing, how we’d sit

at the kitchen table, your knitting

the sixth pair of winter mittens, the cuff

alone a miracle to me, how you’d learned

to gather that one string against all four

of those needles and square off

and pull and slip and bore down on us

like a mother who, exhausted of her cubs

come lately into her coveted dark,

would growl or hiss or whisper  

and spin, just spin, in and in you’d spin.