A break--a quick one--from Tish Warren

Because I heard Linda Pasten read her poetry forty years ag0 already, I've got a better-than-ballpark figure of her age in mind when, in my imagination, I see her today, reading this one, "Imaginary Conversation." I'll whisper the truth: "she's not young."

The character of the poem suggests her age--she's "numbering her days," a task undertaken by seniors with some regularity--but so do the poem's incidentals. The last word in this first stanza is a giveaway--"doctors."

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

The two of them are not going off to work; instead, they're measuring their day in coffee spoons, organizing the next 12 hours. Their lives are not flush with meetings or classroom madness, but "grocery stores and doctors."

I hear her. Neither my partner (the word wife has some baggage, I'm told) nor I have severe medical problems. We are, however, getting old, which means things are quite regularly giving out, which, in turn, means more visits to various iterations of the medical profession--foot doctor, eye doctor, dentist. If I needed proof of this poem being about aging/aged people, "doctors" makes the case.

Suddenly the normal morning conversation makes an abrupt change.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

A perfectly logical rejoinder to Psalm 90. Why number our days as if this one--it's just now six o'clock--could be our very last? Something about that exercise seems morbid. These two old farts are readying their morning coffee, the fireplace is on, of course. They're about to start reading op-eds from the NYTimes, when it strikes poet Pastan that imagining the day before them as if it were their own very first day is vastly more exciting--and it is. Think of Eve's first morning, dawn rising out east, she says. 

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

Viola!--this "first-day idea" works. Just for a moment, just for the time it takes to grind the coffee, the idea of this day being the very first appears to yield dividends because just outside "the dew has baptized every/living surface."

There, see? Gorgeous. Makes life a wonder, which is a good thing when you're way, way over on the other side. That coffee done yet?

I'm not sure I buy the whole wonderful transformation, but it's a good thought, a nice one, a sweet one, the kind of exercise that has some promise. . .

. . .when you're young.

Linda Pastan is not, and neither am I. 

So let's get serious: who's going to which doctor this morning?

__________________________ 

Linda Pastan's "Imaginary Conversation" appeared in yesterday's Writers Almanac.