Little Diary of Getting Old, Part VIII by Carlo Bettochi

And then at night, when old, 

we start having vague pointless

scraps of dreams that lead us

to this place or that, since even

our failing senses insist on

outings: and lost friends reappear, 

sleepwalking through the stupor 

of surrendered existence.

But here too there’s something

that’s not unconscious, as when

the boatman stops his old ferry 

along the banks of the Arno, 

plunges his wooden bailer 

into the bottom of the boat, 

and dumps that stale water,

gone to grime between the staves,

overboard into the river,

where it flows again,

though the boat is held fast

amid the mud and rushes.

(translated by Geoffrey Brock)

The Cold Heaven by W.B. Yeats

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice

And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

So wild that every casual thought of that and this

Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

With the hot bloom of youth, of love crossed long ago;

And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

Riddled with light.  Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,

Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken

By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

NOTE: The visionary moment in the first half of this poem is powerful and, to me, entirely relatable.   

Poem by Chian chen tzu

Ten years living and dead have drawn apart
I do nothing to remember
But I cannot forget
Your lonely grave a thousand miles away …
Nowhere can I talk of my sorrow --
Even if we met, how would you know me
My face full of dust
My hair like snow?

In the dark of night, a dream:  suddenly, I am home
You by the window
Doing your hair
I look at you and cannot speak
Your face is streaked by endless tears
Year after year must they break my heart
These moonlit nights?
That low pine grave?

NOTE:  My father could have written this about my mother who died at age 50 and left my father to grieve until he died at 89.  Sculpture can be found in Les Tuileries, Paris, Ile de France, France. 

Nature: Part Two, XXI - An Awful Tempest Mashed the Air by Emily Dickinson

An awful tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre's cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofs
And whistled in the air,
And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth,
And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;
The monster's faded eyes
Turned slowly to his native coast,
And peace was Paradise!

(NOTE: Dickinson’s life of the imagination formed the transcendental bridge to modern American poetry.  She experimented with expression to free it from conventional restraints.  Go Emily! From Complete Poems, (597) Part One: Life, Part Two: Nature, Part Three: Love, Part Four: Time & Eternity, and Part Five: The Single Hound. Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Mass.)

"The Hospital Window" by James Dickey

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

NOTE: The poet makes a commonplace event transcendent. Here the son experiences a rapturous moment of true understanding—both of his father’s impending death and of his own resignation to mortality.  This is the author who wrote Deliverance (1970).