COMING OF AGE ON MY 84th BIRTHDAY
George Amabile
Something I should have learned when I was young
enough to take it seriously explodes, slowly
like a zucchini blossom, announcing
another surprise in the laddered shades of aging.
Forget the calendar with its beaches
and snow-tufted cedars. Think instead
of the way music tends to extend the distance
between now, and now again. Time,
a perplexity of stars and planets, deft
conjectures and a down--to-earth
god, incarnate in one line of a poem
grass… the beautiful uncut hair
of graves, distant but close enough
to wake up the Buddhist emptiness I
missed in a lifetime of lectures, paper
futures, main-line entertainments...
Something I already know
too many names for changes
like the flame from a sunset lake
in that moment before the last light
fails, and maybe much too late I’m
in love with everything that remains
unsaid, unsayable but suddenly heard
in the sound of rain on a slate roof.
Published in Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (Biblioasis, Ottawa, 2024), and Smartish Pace, Issue 29, February 2022. "Coming of Age on My 84th Birthday" is about entering a new and unexpectedly open state of consciousness, what Joyce called an epiphany, though that may be too grand a word for what these poems describe. (Editor's note: not too grand a word, perfect!)
GEORGE AMABILE has published twelve books and has had work in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature.