*

Eyes of sixty-five

remember lessons

clearer than a school child.

Old clumps of pain-visions accumulate

outdated and worn like a 45

vinyl song

along with joyful thoughts

peaks and valleys, strong

photo’d footholds from the past.

*

The ear of eighty

folds in on itself

as present sounds and conversations lapse.

A hidden chamber filled with wet dreams

rises to the top.

Lost senses brew again

from that squirreled-away

often nasty, occasionally happy

cache.

*

Not ripe enough 

to leap and twirl

our mind still dances

as milk-white bones of ninety– 

porous, brittle, bent

these rounded immanent fossils–

dip towards earth

until they shed the law

and their temporary birth.

*

Freed from dirt-encumbered form

a light-body, as at its young peak

travels easy

eats the fruit of health, well-being, truth

its spirit-heart an everlasting melody

uncontaminated by Sin

and evil

blotted out

like acrid smoke rising from the spit.

Replete with hyphenates, Shapiro’s language in her collection’s title poem recalls the lucid poetics of Old English’s simple compounds–and refers to the status (if not the melancholy spirit) of Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, addressed by Jaques in Act II, Scene vii, of “As You Like It.” However, not too much can or should be made of Shapiro’s Shakespearean reference; her starting point is the Dance–of life, and of death, closer to the idea of medieval theatre’s spectacles of the danse macabre (led by a personified Death figure, absent in this poem) reminding audiences of the universality of mortality, whatever status one may have had in life.

 

In Shapiro’s dance, at last at death we are freed from our mortal coil, lifted sinless and refined into pure spirit. Her previous stanzas describe the encumbrances of our worn bodies and personal histories–pain and pleasure of memories in our sixties, failing senses and lost passions in our eighties, and the fragility and bone loss in our nineties. One wonders a bit if the seventies are skipped over simply because they have not been imagined, or if the poet’s decade-ism just needs a bit more development.

 

Within all the swirling, rising force of her poem, Shapiro has offered some vivid poetic images (“blotted out like acrid smoke rising from the spit,”  “rounded immanent fossils –/dip towards earth,”  “The ear of eighty/folds in on itself,” and even “photo’d footholds”), along with some clunkers that could use better resolution (especially in the final stanza’s ‘happily ever after’ mode where we could use some eloquent, elegiac convincing–“its spirit-heart an everlasting melody” and “that squirreled-away/often nasty, occasionally happy/cache,” the “occasionally” seems an especially awkward adverb there but the whole phrase needs reconsideration.

 

One word in Anglo Saxon, Old English for soul or spirit is gast (literally “breath”), and gastgiefu means “a gift of the holy spirit” (literally translated as “breath gift”), often interpreted  as a “gift of tongues.” Another charming construction is the word, ellorsip, or “journey elsewhere,” referring to the departures of death. I am especially fond of the following explication of the word: eftforgiefnes (Strong Feminine Noun) “a sending back or away releasing a sending back returning of persons of things a throwing back reflecting a letting down lowering a slackening relaxing abating diminishing remitting remission relaxation abatement slackness laxness want of spirit relaxation recreation mildness gentleness lenity a remitting of a penalty etc. a remission in eccl. lat. remission forgiveness of sin a repetition a re-establishing reinstatement restoration renewal,” literally put a renewed or “second forgiveness.”