Age at the Beginning of Knowing
By Joanna Klink
Woken again, this time by wings
scraping the air to pitch the warbler’s
heft from its tree. Its perch.
Is this what it means to grow old, to watch
a bird in March and track, from memory,
rocks and gulls, heat from the sea, mint
in a garden I would have liked to grow.
And the people I met, vivid and headstrong,
now like blown lights beyond the pine boughs.
Sublunar now, in the way of dreams.
What does it matter, this waking and sensing,
when even the immediate past pulls away.
Some skirmish
inside me, turning intolerable, gets me out the door.
Those friends and strangers, they were more
you than yourself. They kept you
from hardening into a poor clutch of desires.
Now blood moves like mist within my veins,
my legs tenuous against the dirt. Gray trees
glowing sticks bleached from winter.
Today my friend,
still young, wants only to live and can’t.
And my father, who is ready to die, can’t.
I feel the end of a way of being, as if on such a walk
I was borne in procession with them. And where
could I go that was not ending. I trust,
some, in moss at the wet edges of the path,
the wasps dangling their strange furred bodies,
and snow, mixed with paper trash, absorbed by mud.
Owls overhead watching me. I don’t see them.
The world once seemed laced with my own
displeasure. Now, on another botched day,
I am ghost-clear, my boots along the soggy banks
crushing prints of animals who last night
pressed on. Shed copper feathers. A breeze
against my eyes. I am more
spirit than I once was, less lashing windpack,
gathering myself into some vaster time,
which holds to tides, to fires in the hills
and the green shoots that, two years later,
push through char. To which mourning means
nothing. There is no longer any racing-away
in me, no explosive
stillness. Just a slender poise
that knows to open and shut, that steps
out the door then later, relieved, in.
Though the walk was beautiful.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2025)