Retirement Poem In Winter

(With apologies to W.H. Auden and his Musee de Beaux Arts)

About retir’ment they were never wrong,
The old masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is working, or opening a
window, or just walking dully along.
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous word, there always must be.
Youngsters who did not especially want it to happen,
skating on a thinning line at the edge of forever.

They never forgot
That even the dreadful hum-a-drum must run
itscourse.
Anyhow, in a corner, some untidy spot
Where kiddies go on with their kiddy life as the
indifferent watch
Scratches his unknowing behind next to me.

In Breugal’s Icarus, for instance, how everyone turns away
Quite leisurely from my disaster. Security –
–– Social heard the splash, the deliberate cry,
As if I were a kind of an important flyer;
the sun shone
As it had to on the slight voice disappearing into the
eternal

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Water; and the expensive delicate trip that must have
seemed
Something amazing: A man falling out of a life,
But they had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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