Robert Creeley

MEMORY

Somewhere Allen Ginsberg is

recalling his mother’s dream

about God, an old man, she says,

living across the river in

Palisades, obscure, battered,

in a shack with hardly any

provisions. Straight off she asks him,

how could you let the world get

into such a mess, and he can

answer only, I did the best I could.

She tells Allen he looks neglected

and there are yellow pee-stains

on his underpants. Hard to hear

God could not do any better

than any of us, just another old

man sitting on some bench or some

chair. I remember it was a urologist

told me how to strip the remaining pee

from my penis by using my finger’s

pressure just back of the balls,

the prostate, then bring it forward

so that the last drops of it would go

into the toilet, not onto my clothes.

Still it’s of necessity an imperfect

solution. How stand at a public urinal

seeming to play with oneself? Yet

how not—if that’s what it takes not

to walk out, awkward, wide-legged, damp

from the crotch down? I cannot

believe age can be easy for anyone. On

Golden Pond may be a pleasant picture

of a lake and that general area of

New Hampshire, but it’s not true,

any of it. Please, don’t put, if

you can help it, your loved ones in

a care facility, they will only die there.

Everyone’s sick there. It’s why they’ve come.

I don’t know now what will or

may happen to me. I don’t

feel any longer a simple person with

a name. I am like a kid at his,

or her, first day of school. All new,

all surprising. The teacher with

her curious large face, the other

unexpected children, all of us finally

unsure. The seeming fractures of a self

grow ominous, like peaks of old

mountains remembered but faint

in the obscuring fog. Time to push off, do

some pushups perhaps, take a walk with

the neighbors I haven’t spoken to in years.