Birthday Poem for 2036
I will not feed you when you’re sixty-four. May it be
the last abandoned promise. When you’re sixty-four
you’ll be no one I’ve belonged to. Your face will carve
its own wrinkles. Stack your own boxes,
stir your own soup, choose a plot in a town
I’ve never made home. When you’re old
and grey and full of sleep a man will sing
this song, maybe the man you’re with now,
and perhaps you won’t think of the people we were
before we could drink. McCartney crooned
and you said you looked forward to growing
old with me. I couldn’t. Old was a scaffold
in an asteroid belt. But I promised to need you.
I will not need you when you’re sixty-four
to tell me the coffee’s ready. I will not need you
to shake my shoulders and thrust me
into another day. But I will need the layers
built up in me to hold. When cliff faces crack
and shuffle rubble into the sea, stripes of sandstone
shine through the clefts—hints of muscle
long gone still. One day I’ll stand
in the middle of a field and be old
after all this time. I’ll be expected,
if I’m lucky, in a cove that holds no trace
of your voice, and the steps it taught me
will echo in the steps that carry me there.
___________
Scott Beal
Review by Marc Janssen
This poem is closely linked with the Beatles song “When I’m sixty-Four.” That song asks a question of will the two people in it, will their relationship last? The answer in the first line of the poem is “no.” We remember promises we made to our loves, promises that we did not keep. All of the sudden it’s 2036 we are sixty-four (I will be depressingly a lot older than 64 in 2036) looking back and realizing that you didn’t leave someone behind but they were with you through all these years.