Older Now: Poems

By LELjr

Older Now: Poems is a collection of LELjrs most recent poetry. As with his first collection, Out of My Mind: Poems, the new book reflects on parenthood, romantic love, aging, memory, and mortality in their various expressionscontemplation, introspection, insight, and emotionas he has grown older. The poems are more inward-looking than the earlier ones. I am everyone I have ever been, he says. Yet as he writes in the title poem, he says I find myself in a narrowing space between memory and mortality, and I am not at all sure which way to look as he explores T. S. Eliots overwhelming question: Has it all been worth it? He hopes these poems evoked similar types of reflection by readers who are, will someday be, or know someone who is older now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984534590

LELjr

LELjr, under his given name Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., is the Sydney Stein Jr. Professor Emerirus of the University of Chicago. He is the author or co-author of a dozen monographs and a textbook in the academic field of public affairs and has also taught at Harvard, Stanford, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, An Iberian Trilogy and Other Stories. He lives with his wife, artist prlynn, in Austin Texas and has five children, nine grandchildren, three great grandchildren (and counting).

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Laurence E. Lynn Jr.

Library of Congress Control Number:            2018906920

ISBN:                  Hardcover                           978-1-9845-3461-3

                            Softcover                              978-1-9845-3460-6

                            eBook                                   978-1-9845-3459-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/11/2018

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Cover: LEL JR – prlynn – www.prlynnart.com

To my wife, Pat,

And to our friend Mary.

Life and love only mean more.

Contents

Preface

CONTEMPLATION

Composition

Erotic Evenings

Habla del Silencio

Creature Comforts

They Call the Wind Levante

One Morning in Ronda

Tree of Life

Where Is God?

At the Cusp

INTROSPECTION

Avalon

Drifting

Finitude

Older Now

Spending Time

The Season(ing)s of a Man’s Life

INSIGHT

Longevity

Passing Facts

Returners

Tell Me

Who Is He?

Without You

EMOTION

Inflection Point

yraMaria

The Horseman

The Summit

A Love Song

It All Comes to This

Preface

The poems in this collection were composed following the 2015 publication of Out of My Mind: Poems, comprising poetry I’d composed over nearly a quarter century. Older now, I have been drawn more toward T. S. Eliot’s overwhelming question: Has it all been worth it? As time takes its toll on memory, what’s remembered both gleams more brightly, cuts more deeply, and withal, makes more sense.

I have organized these poems, as I did with the first collection, into four categories: contemplation, interpretation, insight, and emotion, though some poems represent all these or consider the same experience—parenthood, romantic love, aging—through different lenses. I would be gratified if these poems evoked similar introspection by readers who are, and will someday be, older now.

Contemplation

image.jpg

Composition

I felt it, sudden, a frisson,

Saw it, the room, its objects,

Lit as if by a strobe light.

There was no light, no sound,

Rather, a strobe of affect,

The room becomes a tableau

Depicting the relationship

She and I have made,

Things that conjoin our souls,

Chosen and placed carefully.

I’m in it, here, in this chair,

She, too, in everything around me.

I know when she and I

First felt and chose them, and why.

Confronting me

From the wall beside the stairwell,

A large spectral painting,

Found in a gallery one night

On Chicago’s Near North Side,

A bear pauses in the woods

Between me and a clearing beyond,

Inspects me with interest

In the orange light of evening.

I am mesmerized by her.

To my left,

In a space meant just for them,

Are a round dining table

And its four sturdy chairs,

Made by Amish craftsmen

Of solid, satiny oak,

Where our daughter’s little girl

Has made a gingerbread house,

Carved a Halloween pumpkin,

Composed a poem for us.

On an adjacent wall,

Above a sideboard wine rack,

Hang paintings by the little girl’s grandma,

Her varied subjects including

An old woman hanging out laundry

On the terrace of her house

By a tumbling stream in Spain

As we have lunch and watch her

From a table across the way;

Beguiling scenes along

A forgotten road in Texas;

A weathered clapboard chapel,

Long abandoned, beside

An aging, spindly tree;

A column of tightly rolled hay bales;

A makeshift roadside shrine

Of faded plastic flowers

At the scene of a fatal crash;

A tree whose delicate curvature

Mirrors the nearby road.

To my right,

Above the limestone fireplace,

Hangs an astonishing watercolor,

From a gallery in Bend, Oregon,

Still there after three