Frank Robinson: Ending the year with 'a bodyguard of ghosts' all around us
Photo by THOMAS HOOK (Connecticut-based nature photographer and essayist). He writes:
"We had our first proper snowfall last weekend. The next day on the white snow was a single, battered oak leaf.
"This reminded me of what anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote of the world of primitive men who might see 'portents in the fall of a leaf.' This solitary leaf on the freshly fallen snow stamps autumn as dead and winter as ruling.''
December poem, by Frank Robinson
The letters in our new mail box
somehow seem
more important now.
xxx
This crossword puzzle is a bear.
Fifty years on,
and I’m still working on the first clue.
xxx
Begin every day with a poem
and get it over with
(with thanks to W.C. Fields).
xxx
This old skin I sleep in every night –
like a suit I should have sold
years ago.
xxx
Women have no illusions,
they know the cost of everything,
including love.
xxx
It will happen very slowly,
one second every million years.
Even so, I’m glad
I won’t be around
when it happens.
xxx
Am I proud or sad,
to pass my father’s “Sell by’’ date
by ten years?
xxx
For this, I gave up
family and friends,
for a hearty handshake at the end?
xxx
When you have a job,
You succeed or fail every day.
When you don’t,
you neither succeed nor fail.
xxx
I have no time, I have no time,
I’m too busy doing nothing.
xxx
In this place, no one is alone;
everyone comes with a bodyguard of ghosts.
xxx
Growing old, dying, lousy weather –
Oh, Margaret, you deserve better.
xxx
Is she so beautiful
because she’s so young,
or because I’m so old?
xxx
A hard choice:
recognition now,
or immortality when I’m dead?
xxx
On the beach –
I’m smarter than the waves,
smarter than the sand,
a genius compared to the sky,
so I’ll enjoy it all while I can.
xxx:::
At least it celebrates spring,
the nest they built
in our Christmas wreath.
-- Frank Robinson
Mr. Robinson is a poet, former director of the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, former director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and an art historian.