They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward

The stars have gone north, abandoning the city
For this wilderness that is mine, if only for a time,
Long enough to learn the language of the leaves before

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that. 

And if the mortally wounded warrior revives, and if
      his after-dinner pipe leads the drowsy sinner
to cast a long loving look at the cello in the corner

The question is not how like the animals we are
But how we got that way. We laugh, for what is a suicide note

But the epitaph of an emotion? Few of us die out in the open;

In retrospect it was romantic to be the lonely American recovering from 
        pneumonia, living in a hotel room with a typewriter
        and a sink in a Left Bank hotel in a gray Paris winter.

As a boy (who destroyed his eyesight
Reading in the dark by flashlight)
I went to the library

I.  In the sixth grade 
          Eisenhower to go down to South America 
          And Mrs. Goldman to write on the board, 

I never liked the World Trade Center.
When it went up I talked it down
as did many other New Yorkers.

Poetry is to jazz
as literature is to music
as Lake Como is to the Arno River