What It's Like to Fall @ 77 Years Old

I am hallucinating the out of doors

because I am inside until further notice

every window in my house brings me

light, bare trees, snow on the ground

indoors is this ugly aluminum walker

in my lap a book about taking the walks

Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod

Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly

two centuries ago people truly walked

New England out of doors was country

from here to there & yet a farther there

as far as one might walk in a day, a week

a month . . . one day I might be back up

on both of my feet & out of doors again

US Public High School, 2025

she tells me about a boy who comes to school

filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says

I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower?

no parents? no home? what brings him to school

every day? he’s one of six students in her

“intervention” group, students who are behind

who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn

the parts of speech, though all of them can speak

they know how to assemble verb, noun, adjective

so in fact they know parts of speech as a dog

knows a hydrant, a cat, its owner, without

giving names to any of them — a dirty silent

boy, who agrees to sit at the group table the day

another boy, the one who misbehaves, is absent