(Written from a senior community)
By Frank Robinson
This is the place
where old people go,
to visit their parents.
xxx
Work or retirement –
a hard choice
between wasting time doing something
or wasting time doing nothing.
xxx
I wasn’t old
until I went to an old people’s home;
old age is catching.
xxx
Is this a hospital or a home?
A little bit of both.
xxx
Everybody is nobody here,
no matter what you were.
You make yourself
every day.
xxx
In line at our café –
“I’m in a hurry;
My husband is dying.’’
xxx
If this is what life is like when I’m lucky,
God help me when I’m not.
xxx
There are so many exotic diseases these days,
cancer and heart attack
seem kind of safe.
xxx
Christmas here:
a hundred flowers
waiting at the front desk.
xxx
What a perfect marriage!
We take turns being sick.
xxx
This is the world of second chances,
of last chances,
a new beginning at the end.
xxx
Those days when I don’t want to live
and don’t want to die,
it takes a lot
to get out of bed.
xxx
To be old is to worry,
especially when there’s nothing
to worry about.
xxx
From the first,
I knew we owed the gods a death,
but I didn’t know
we owed them two,
yours and mine.
xxx
If someone’s really old,
you hate to waste their time
saying hello.
xxx
We think about the past every day,
that abandoned building
we forgot to tear down.
xxx
These days,
I talk to myself even more,
now that people can’t hear me.
(Did they listen before?)
xxx
This is the test:
Can you be patient and kind
to people who are dying?
xxx
Old age –
when suddenly
everything around you
seems fragile.
xxx
When someone tells you
her husband is doing well,
you know he isn’t
xxx
We use ski poles in every season,
even in summer –
in preparation, I suppose, for winter.
xxx
This is a strange world,
so comfortable and safe,
and yet so close to pain and death.
xxx
This place is such a good subject for poetry,
let’s hope nobody comes up with a miracle cure.
xxx
I forget things I shouldn’t forget
and remember things I shouldn’t remember.
I think too much.
xxx
Watch out for those wheelchairs!
They’re just showing off,
or getting back at us
for walking.
Frank Robinson, an art historian and the former director of the art museums at Cornell University and the Rhode Island School of Design, is a poet and essayist living in Ithaca, N.Y.
