It’s a given, after a certain age,
when it seems everything has changed—
it could perhaps loosely be called slippage—
that some seniors end up becoming estranged
from life as grizzled salts do, by and by,
from land after spending their lives at sea.
Like flightless birds do the sky, they eye
the sea as fallen leaves might a tree.
Outliving contemporaries and fashions,
outliving siblings, even their own children,
as well as thirty thousand setting suns,
they long to hear the Host say, “Say when.”
Things out of fashion include spats, bonnets,
and ornate Elizabethan sonnets.
Robert Forrey
