If I Listen Hard Enough

Category: Poem

This poem was written by my friend Terry Barker 10 years ago. Terry is now 79 and he's still the smartest and best looking fellow on the Sunshine Coast. Here's a photo of Terry.


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If I listen hard enough
to what’s happening in the basement of my eyes,
I can hear the tinny crash and rattle
of collapsing rods and cones.

Things are breaking down.

I know I must confess to
dying taste buds, loss of sexual vigour,
passing of old friends, and
thin struggling streams
(once waterfalls, floods, great Fundy tides)
that weakly pump past ballooning prostate,
the cough that won’t go away.

Well, I can live with all that.

It’s the price of a long life.

But O God it hurts
to lose at last the fresh sting
of the impertinent slippery clarinet slide
that once raised Gershwin gooseflesh,
and in place of ecstasy, say, wisely,
O yes, of course, that’s Rhapsody in Blue:
to always know what words always always always follow
Let me not to the marriage of true minds….
and what’s worse, to know for utter utter utter certain
that they will never ever ever ever change:
to smell the rose and note
that yes, its scent is exactly the same
as it was yesterday.

To see Thelma and Louise and say,
O, another chase movie.

If I could have one wish, it would be
to hear and see and smell these beloved things
once more
for the first time.