“If you don’t use it, you lose it,” the ex-marine said as he leaned against the side of the pool and after two hours of laps up and down its length.
It was senior swim day. His skin held to his 80-year-old body firmly. His squinting eyes looked as though they were bordered with the tattooed lines of a sun dial’s second hand.
His wife passed last week. He walked beside her as her body slowly faded.
“No matter how old your body gets,” he said. “Your mind still imagines you’re 20.”

Life, a friend tells me, renews itself over and over again. An aspect of our being seems to die, and we grasp for its memory as it falls.
Sorrow hides growth.

I hope to die during Autumn.
I want fallen leaves to surround me.

The wind blows steady then
with promise of a calm.
The silence of winter
lies a blanket of rest
over earth and the pine box below.

The pine should be unfinished,
filled with knots, imperfections.

Temperate soil,
free from frost,
cluttered with granite,
return me to the land.

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