When You Are Old
If the songs we knew should live as long as you live,
and in your late hours, you hear them
bellowing from a tienda or on a bus, blaring,
you’ll think of the boys who danced them with you first.
The places we’ve been you’ve been before
and you’ll go again, with other men,
each visit erasing a little more of me
until I am less than a palimpsest.
Even the kisses we shared will be eclipsed
by fierier lips.
How will you remember me
when you are old and gray and tired?
Will I be forced to pull my head from the stars
and humble poetry by banging on your door?
Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons.
His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.