Cached from
http://mason.gmu.edu/~mfowler2/english201/poems.pdf

March Birthday, and After
by John Updike

(The New Yorker, August 5, 2002, page 63)

Mild winter, then a birthday burst of snow.
A faint neuralgia, flitting tooth-root to
knee and shoulder-joint, a vacant head,
too many friendly wishes to parry,
too many cakes. Oh, let the years alone!
They pile up if we manage not to die,
glass dollars in the back, dry pages on
the shelf. The boy I was no longer smiles

a greeting from the bottom of the well,
blue sky behind him from a storybook.
The Philco sings out “Hi-yo” by his sickbed;
he thinks that Mother, Father, mailman, and
the wheezy doctor with his wide black bag
exist for him, and so they do, or did.

*

Wife absent for a day or two, I wake
alone and older, the storm that aged me
distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow
so thin a blanket blades of grass show through.
Snow makes white shadows, there behind the yews,
dissolving in the sun’s slant kiss, and pools
itself across the lawn as if to say,
Give me another hour, then I’ll go.

The lawn’s begun to green. Beyond the Bay--
where I have watched, these twenty years, dim ships
ply the horizon, feeding oil to Boston,
and blinking lights descend, night after night,
to land unseen at Logan—low land implies
a sprawl of other lives, beneath torn clouds.

*

Raw days, though spring has been declared.
I settle in, to that decade in which,
I’m told, most people die. Then, flying south,
I wonder why houses in their patterned crowds
look white, whatever their earthbound colors,
from the air. Golf courses, nameless rivers.
The naked Connecticut woods hold veins
of madder like the green veins of the sea.

The pilot takes us down Manhattan’s spine—
the projects, Riverside cathedral, midtown
bristling up like some coarse porcupine.
We seem too low, my palms begin to sweat.
The worst can happen, we know it from the news.
Age I must, but die I would rather not.

*

Not yet. Home safe. New England’s vernal drought
has taken a hit this week of sleety rain,
Spent harbingers, the snowdrops lie
in drenched, bedraggled clumps, their tired news
becoming weeds. The crocuses drink in
the leaden air and spread their stained-glass cups
to catch the filtered sun clapboards reflect,
and daffodils grow leggy like young girls.

Nature is never bored, and we whose lives
are linearly pinned to these
self-fascinated cycles can’t complain,
though aches and pains and even dreams a-crawl
with wood lice of decay give pause to praise.
Birthday, death-day—what day is not both?

2002