✒Ivy on the Wall
A poem for infants and the very old
When Papa died, I became fascinated by “second infancy,” what Shakespeare calls that tiny sliver of time at the end of a very long life.
Think about it and it makes sense.
We start out tiny and frail and gummy and soft and defenseless and stupid and gentle and coarse and stinky, and then, most of us live a life of growth and strength, of opening bank accounts and buying cars and working out and eating well and staying up late to look at the stars and climbing large hills all on our own, and then bit by bit the great arch turns and we begin to descend again into second babyhood: being tiny and frail and gummy and soft and defenseless and stupid and gentle and coarse and stinky.
I think largely we have the middle-year-people to blame, those of use within the 18-75 year bracket, for this hegemony of the able bodied, rational-minded average. And that is frankly tragic. The brains of the very old and the very young are more in tune with what is, are fundamentally more wired into what we have evolved to be and not be than the rest of us- those “rational minded in charge” people who know all the good reasons to avoid the doom scroll and choose not to follow them, that obscure life with products and sedatives and club allegiances.
When you consider that the competition is not especially steep, I say long live the infant and long live the short lived, for theirs is the kingdom of life.
I wasn’t thinking those things necessarily when Papa died.
I was thinking of the toothless, boneless grown man in the room next to me who sat up amidst a thunder storm and mumbled in child-terror-speak: “What’s that rumblin?” I was thinking of the peace and solace he got from me singing him to sleep. This was the father of my father. A manager of a Goodyear tire store who, though he could be tender, didn’t ask for help. And I was thinking of how I sang him a U2 song as he drifted back into oblivion, and I sat beside him, stroking his hand, thoroughly humbled by what I had seen.
Fast forward about a decade and I had a little bundle of my own that grew and grew and grew into a little tottering menace. We named her Ivy after a beloved friend by that name. Ivy is a plant that is full of life. That endures. That grows over whatever it is planted on. That spreads out. That takes up space. All of which I desperately hope for her.
We were at the park and she was balancing on a cobblestone wall and I was holding her hand and the memory struck hard and fast- holding Papa’s hand to roll him over so we could change his piss-swollen diapers, or holding his hand to move him from room to room, or so that he might fall back asleep.
And the similarities were uncanny as death itself, and this poem popped into my mind.
Ivy on the Wall
One day not too far away
you will be this tall,
not even walking
on a wall;
float by my side
hold my hand
as I totter on,
and try, try to understand
what you are saying
in your imperceptible code.
And one day not too long from now
I won’t know how
to say my words the way
they should be said.
I’ll crinkle up my forehead,
pinch my raisin eyes
and squint at you,
like you squint at me, now,
One day you’ll tell me not to slip
a dozen times, and it won’t make
a whiff of difference when you do it either.
Stubborn we are,
and stubborn we shall return, each seeing the world
as it seems through the self curved prism of age
or youth or agelessness.
One day when more years have come
you’ll lay me down to rest,
pray I sleep,
close the door,
quietly weep.
I see a tall one standing beside one tender-frail
lying on their back.
“You look so peaceful,” the tall one says.
And with that, the great circle closes.