Astonished..................

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities.  Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse.  And the clouds
- no mere measure or geometry, no cubism
can account for clouds, or satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new - who has known it
before? - and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man.  And you, who are as old
almost as I am.  I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

-Wendell Berry


art courtesy of