Invitation to an Old
Dog
At eighty-seven, Czesław Miłosz was writing
poetry, Roadside Dog,
“Piesek przydrożny.”
At eighty-seven, my father watches Fox.
(I refuse to call it “News,” “Fox Lies” then.)
And he dozes, thankfully, before the big screen.
Rancor and unreason are a tiring business,
lucrative, though, it seems to howlers and yippers.
Sleep, Old Dog, the Bucs’ll be on in an hour.
Retired now for a quarter of a century,
you would seem to have done nothing.
Watch the world through that perverse window,
eat sweets, complain about your body’s demise…
(And grouse that medical science doesn’t understand it.
“You’re eighty-seven, you’re an old man!”)
As if its demise had nothing to do
with sitting all day in front of the TV,
(Recall how you taunted your children for that very habit)
absorbing the poisonous rays like Madame Curie.
Yes, I guess, you’ve golfed religiously,
taken skins from your fellow old men—in quarters,
a couple of bucks a week over the years adds up.
And from me, damn you, that is something.
Too, you have bestowed upon your second son
a mission to revisit the evenings of our forefathers
in the dim and far-off past, in a difficult language.
No small gift, thank you for that.
And, yes, you have written your memoirs, which have their
moments,
but only up to, not even up to, when you met the mother of
your many children.
And not a word about losing your son. Not a word.
There is yet to write. Miłosz lived to ninety-three.
