Watching and Listening

Looking between the clouds and trees for the moon at midnight and listening for your lasting voice. Is it too late? Has too much time passed? You're out there somewhere in the distance. My last memory is of your tears. I've tried to reconcile that with my failures. I've tried to reach an understanding.  

Two or three days have passed, and a friend has been unable to go into the room that her mother passed away in. I wish I could give hope that will change today. Hopefully she can reach an easy truce with those fears.

I sometimes look in the mirror and see lingering remnants of youth. I close my eyes, reopen and look again and see an old man.

It seems that the one thing you can't avoid or turn off as you get older is accounts of other people's passing. There's no turning away from such news. It just finds you. 

One thing I'm proud of. This guy I work with .... I'll stop short of calling him a friend because I haven't been around him for long and he's already developed a way of annoying me .... but he constantly makes old man sounds whenever he sits down and settles into place. And he can't be much older than thirty. I at 68-plus, can come and go, sit and stand, twist and turn, all without a single old man groan.