I wage constant war against
the normal ways one gets old.
Will I be allowed to hold
on to the pull of deep water
and walk the shore to collect,
in discarded milk jugs, heart-
shaped stones no one will see?
                               Do you know,
this lake has its own Moby Dick,
nature’s leviathan waiting for me
with its whopping tail?  84 years
in the plurality of this world,
my surface scratched by every 
kind of delight and madness, 
love and rejection, but it’s here
under the palisades of the Dix,
that the singularity of my life
has been revealed