Seventieth Birthday - Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Seventieth Birthday

There was rain in early November but afterwards
The land’s hope failed, the small grass on the mountain withered and died,
Dry fell the frost. Even the southwind brought no clouds,
The sun blazed in the air like a block of ice.

                                                                       I rode up over the ridge from the ocean
And came into death’s own country; there were dead cows and calves under every bush and the little broken-
Windowed farmhouse was as dead as the cows. They lay flat on their flanks, black and white hides
Rather than carcasses, keeping their tryst with the earth, settling into the ground.
That’s the trouble with death—
So submissive, so docile ,so humbled, it tries to hide, to slide underground, it has no effrontery
Except the stench. I do not want to be humbled.

But now my love has died and I am half dead.
My friends are dying, even my dogs have died, even the grim and psychotic bull-dog
That used to turn and attack me from time to time and in mid-leap become sane. I loved him well
But when he hurt my grandchild we had him killed. That was betrayal; he trusted us. I fondled him going to die’
I was Judas. I have been perhaps all men.

Why do I dream lately so much about death?
Today’s my seventieth birthday: do I want to die?
When I turned fifty I had the strength to be willing
To live forever. Even now twenty years weaker, I might endure it,
But the gleam is gone.

                                   When I came down from the height—
The corpse-crowned hill—I saw a comedy of two survivors. Nearer the ocean a little nourishment
Under the kindly sea-fog grows from the ground. There was a worried cow grazing and walking,
Bone-gaunt, with a gaunt pig at here teats. She would step forward, he would catch and suck, he would follow her
And she could not refuse him. Her calf no doubt had died but her watery milk was made to be sucked.
It was very funny: she would neither kick nor submit, she was like me with death, she with her pig.

	- Robinson Jeffers