Life savings

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