Life savings

    August 1, 2018

    Daniel Moran
    Webster, New Hampshire, United States

     

    Aging is the bank
    which accepts deposits,
    and will not ever
    give them back.
    But it does have its
    tiny catalogue of
    compensations. I recall those
    ancient days when
    opening that account
    might earn you a new
    toaster or blender,
    a set of steak knives.This week, after
    finding out that the
    the steamy apparition,
    which has taken up
    residence near the foul pole
    in the left field of my vision,
    is not a brain tumor,Has made me
    oddly less concerned
    about how much easier
    it seems to be for me
    to peer onto my scalp
    through the last efforts of
    what use to be a magnificent
    head of wavy hair.

    Like the sharp January day
    I lost my feet on the ice,
    and knocked myself out cold,
    after the nice young doctor
    let me know that the brick walk
    had not, in fact, cracked my
    skull open like a walnut,

    		I felt a curious pleasure
    in now knowing my dear wife
    could get me to the doors
    of the local Emergency Room
    without killing us both
    in a fiery car wreck. So this afternoon, watching
    a great parade of cumulus clouds,
    as the minutes click off unattended,
    I am content in the knowledge
    that I will probably not
    die this week or the next.And accepting of the fact
    that today’s aches will be
    more tolerable today than
    they will  be tomorrow,
    one day I will place my
    last nickel in the bank’s
    cold and stingy metal slot.I will appeal to some burly nurse
    in a flowered top to prop
    up my pillow just a bit, and
    comb back neatly the gathering
    of my last remaining hairs.

    But alas, I now proclaim.
    In this part of the known world,
    it is a few good turns past five,
    on a pleasing Friday afternoon.
    I think I will softly push
    the hair back over my head,
    and mark the occasion
    with a toast to my love
    and to my good health.

     

     

     

     

    DANIEL THOMAS MORAN, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of ten collections of poetry. His eleventh collection, “In the Kingdom of Autumn”, will be published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in 2019. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived by The Department of Special Collections at Stony Brook University. He is a retired Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine, where he delivered the Commencement Address in 2011. He is Arts Editor for The Humanist magazine in Washington, DC. He and his wife Karen live in Webster, New Hampshire.

     

    Summer 2018  |  Sections  |  Poetry