The Older Years Age

My older years age
The receipt falls, yellowed, from a book bought just last year
The lost memories of young years
they stay young
in rerun, that same blonde boy
living them
That young me who I admire from this far post
of thirty years
The young me is young even in memory
He is not me
He used to be
He still is who he was, dropping his popsicle onto the backporch
and it being overrun by ants
I lived him for brief seconds. They still are young
These older years age...

The moon looks young for her age
casting her long milky leg on the smooth water
of Buckeye Lake
the same lake for the nearly 30 years I've been coming
My Uncle Pat is catching catfish and I am 3 years old
and Uncle Paul and dead Aunt Carol are reading the paper and I am 14
Water is the oldest thing around
it tastes like youth
for every one of its 5000 drinks

I push farther into the new millenia
The new crystles shoot through the pavement on Astor Place
They weren't here
when I got here
My older self, brother of the weathered tenement
passes through the glitzy facades built over
the old stoops
remembering St. Marks Place crusted in snow
slipping into St. Dymphnas' Tavern
beneath the strung Christmas lights
I am still 24 years old
every time I pass
drinking that frothy beer on New Years' Eve
and my friend Anna
is dislocating her knee in Luca Bar across the street
dancing and mopping closing the place down
Most of my life is behind me

I don't know how to go back
to being young
I have seen what I have seen
I have worked hard to learn things that I'd have been better off
not knowing
I am a tree with a calloused hide of rings
The years are shields thickened
against the blows of maturation
My older years age
Every day a newborn
Every day reborn
the same man
another day along