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The Joy of Aging
Jeff Schwartz

They get it. The way the word detritus
opens their mouths and lands on a sibilant ‘s’

& how it lifts them to family attics
full of old dinnerware, dolls with yarn hair, & knickknacks

their adult children someday will discard.
They feel the endurance

it takes to recite a 3-stanza-long sentence as it empties
their lungs. And they hang on to that last breath

because they suspect that even when they wish
that words will be enough, they know they will not.

And when we read the poem about the mother
flicking sunburn peels off her son’s shoulders,

they can feel the hot flesh. They know
the touch of love and the reverse: the slow

compression of regret like tissue paper
flattened under wedding gifts that, decades

later, still ask to be unpacked. And when
we get to the poem about grief & letting

go, they recognize how death hits you
when the shopping bag breaks, or the spoon

jams the disposal, or the way you glimpse
your spouse’s reflection not in the moment you’re browsing

in front of the store window, but a fraction
of a second later, after you’ve passed.


with thanks to Hall, Hayden, Olds, & Howe

—
Jeff Schwartz grew up in Ohio and currently lives in Connecticut, where he has taught for Greenwich Academy, Global Online Academy, and Fairfield University. He was an early member of Alice James Books and has poems published recently or forthcoming in the Berru Poetry Series, Pedestal, English Journal, Hanging Loose, and Abandoned Mine (issue 4). He also writes frequently on student-centered learning.

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