Richard Pflum
October 2003

Generations


                               That is no country for old men. The young
                               In one another's arms, birds in the trees
                               —Those dying generations—at their song,
                                                            — W. B. Yeats

And so they continue in separate boxes, making
time a wall instead of a vista, pretending
or maybe actually believing that each is
cut off from the other by rut or by water,
that this river is a series of tepid pools,
fiefdoms each must do their best to exploit.

And so the sky bends across arrogant heads
as they throw away the splendid gifts they were
endowed with, some with magnificent bravado,
others pretending to no inheritance, disparaging
even the grass on graves of elders, believing
themselves fated to conceive their own fathers.

Now they overload the trees with encrustations:
glossy productions, glittering icons on the highest
slimmest branches … cover everything with the
brittle plaque of sensation. When branches crack,
history becomes mere obsolescence, a tablature
in chalk that brushes away with their bodies.

And so stage lights fade, idols grow old while
all wallow in a sappy nostalgia: their grief
becoming the sharpened stake they run upon,
their desiccate love, a shell held desperately close,
encircled by arms, yet crumbling by the hour
… a swift, cold river carrying away the debris.

from Strange Requests, The Muse Rules Press, Indianapolis 2002.