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This is a bonafide reckoning with aging; not so much philosophical to my ear as it is isolating. The senses are shutting down. There is a gossamer-like, colorless quality to the voice.
I love the title. The present-ness of it.
Things slowly settle into melancholy and in the final lines a simple profoundness is present that sings.
My only question is regarding the irregular stanzaic lineation but that can be seen as an echo of the uneasy mood of the poem. Would you consider tercets from top to bottom?
Because I’m an inveterate tinkerer, here are a few word choices I thought might be worth consideration:
S5L1: "replace "talk" with "laugh".
I think it sounds better both sonically and from the standpoint of the imagery of isolation that I get from the N being left out of the joking/laughing. It would also provide the slant repetition of "laughter" in S5L2 and then the rhyme of "after" in S5L3. —All of which have a sonic, slant rhyme quality.
S7: “A wind is blowing way above my head” — do you need “way”? Another thought would be to replace “way” with “far” and that would play off “nearer” in S6L3.
If you were to reduce the last stanza to three lines I thought this might work:
A wind is blowing far above my head.
I wonder what it brings: nearer now,
the hushing shadow at the end of things.
Anyway, I’m poking around too much. I like the poem very much.
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