The Packrat by Michael L. Newell

No never no never no

never again cried the bent man to the wind--

never again will I dance to the fiddle

that filled my spring days with leaps, shouts, and laughter;

 

my back crooks, a question mark

shaped like life, my fumbling life

that stumbles through alleys, down piers,

beneath rotting bridges where children's voices

peal out: look at the funny fat gray bearded man

tripping over his bellbottoms, his seedy old bellbottoms;

 

I  pass lovers, my hungry eyes averted from their shrinking;

I pass lovers, my ears keen for every sound of passion,

scraps to feed on as darkness falls, as I creep under bushes

or trash bins, as my voice fondles swatches of melody

from boyhood, when the wind sang of flight into perpetual sun

and the moon and stars were a gem-studded shawl;

 

I pass lovers and stuff the pockets of my  heart

with others' dreams to be sorted through greedily--

I know somewhere in these volumes I cart about

is a life I might have lived;

now even fresh fallen snow blackens beneath my swollen feet

wrapped in rags discarded by the profligate young;

 

to see only others, or the past, is my motto

as I huddle in the undemanding company of broken bottles,

tin cans, and the mind's ashes…

 

 

* First published in Poetry/La (1989)

Michael L. Newell is a retired English/Theatre teacher and long time expatriate.  He is widely published.  His most recent book is Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge (Bellowing Ark Press, 2018).