Fountain of Youth

Three poems on aging, featuring centenarians Henry Morgenthau III, Sarah Yerkes and Jean Connor.
7 minutes

TRANSCRIPT

On April 2, 1513, Spanish explorer Ponce De Leon landed his ship at what is now St. Augustine, Florida. Legend has it that he was looking for the Fountain of Youth, magical waters that stopped or reversed aging. Apparently, there’s nothing in writing that that’s what he was doing in Florida—or anywhere else—but it was a good story, and it caught on, and now, that’s what many of us remember him—and St. Augustine—for.

So many of Passager’s writers act and think younger than their age. On this edition of Burning Bright, we’ll hear the work of three Passager poets that were still writing at age 100 and beyond—and writing about age.

Henry Morgenthau III was in his 90s when he started to write poems. And he was 100 when Passager published his book A Sunday in Purgatory. Here from that book is Henry’s poem “The Last Act.”

I’m telling you my dear,
dying is the most important
event in your life.
You can rehearse it
in your head and with your body.
You can prepare for it
all your life,
you can only do it once,
there is no looking back.
You can never ask,
“Did I do it well?”
You will never know.
No one will know.
It will be said,
“Surrounded by his loving family,
he died peacefully.”
Cold comfort for the warm-blooded:
a sugar-coated lie.

Henry Morgenthau III’s poem “The Last Act.”

Sarah Yerkes was a landscape architect and a sculptor who worked with metal and welding torches. When she couldn’t manipulate the steel and the tools anymore, she switched to manipulating words, to writing poetry. Sarah published Days of Blue and Flame when she was 100 years old. I think she’s 106 now. Here’s her poem “Meditations on Time.”

Time becomes slippery as we grow old,
yesterday’s baby is now forty-five!
The past our parents could have told about
wasn’t important when they were alive.

When she died, my mother was seventy.
We did not have the conversations then
that I do with my child, who’s seventy.
Will we remember the where or the when?

Do questions important when we were young
remain as pertinent now that we’re old,
are they not different, since we’ve lived longer?
What are the answers I would have been told?

Should we suggest to our grown children that
we use the years left to rid ourselves of
Curiosity, Resentments and Fears
and other bad thoughts that turn away love?

Clean out closets of Ruined Relations,
Hurting Feelings and Unanswered Letters.
Strenuous measures, tackled together
benefit all, the older the better.

II
Time is amorphous
drifts hither and yon
like a contrail in the sky

or it is stubborn
marching inexorably
into the unexplored future

often it’s rigid
cannot be bent
from one epoch
into another

spirits in this sphere
and those who have left
can’t make tears in Time’s web
to reach one another

the morning paper tells me
that Einstein was right
gravity does have waves

astonishingly, this means
that we can just now watch
two stars colliding
13,000,000 years ago

Five minutes writing time seems like a day,
Five minutes scrubbing floors can last forever.

Nowhere in books of physics have I read
that time can be elastic. It can act
as holder of a wisp of golden thread
or of a long, uninteresting tract.

III
Assembling my breakfast tray,
one of the rituals I invent
helps me to arrange my day.

“Meditations on Time.” Sarah Yerkes.

Jean Connor published her first book A Cartography of Peace at age 86. Poet Robin Behn said that only some art knows how to teach us how to live, and in a way that we are . . . ardently willing to be taught. Behn puts Jean Connor at the head of this rare class. Here’s Jean’s poem “Of Some Renown,” a wonderful poem about aging.

For some time now, I have
lived anonymously. No one
appears to think it odd.
They think the old are,
well, what they seem. Yet
see that great egret

at the marsh’s edge, solitary,
still? Mere pretense
that stillness. His silence is
a lie. In his own pond he is
of some renown, a stalker,
a catcher of fish. Watch him.

“Of Some Renown,” Jean Connor. Jean died at 102.

To buy Jean’s book A Cartography of Peace, Sarah’s book Days of Blue and Flame, Henry’s book A Sunday in Purgatory, or to subscribe to or learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50, go to passagerbooks.com. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.