I love the woods in winter, the bear-ruined spires, the unleafed filigree of trunk and limb, branch and twig; the glint of setting sun on flint, lichen slowly unraveling stone. Everything falters. Without snow, that bland masquerade, all faults are open: Trees crashed and fallen, scorched by the slow fire of rot and ruin; stones—big boulders—crack and crumble, slip away; streams meander; bones break. Is this not to be yearned for—riot and ruin, the flaws of nature bared at last?
Life extension is a burgeoning area of scientific interest, and the theme of immortality has been, at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, a central preoccupation of poetry. Yet while medicine tries to thwart aging, creating antiaging serums for wrinkles, trialing new health supplements to improve memory, or offering procedures to restore youthful mobility, in contrast, poetry remains a powerful medium for contemplating more existential concepts related to mortality. And so the poem “Gerontology” creates a timeless allegory of aging, at once applicable to the modern era, yet in a lyrical form reminiscent of Robert Frost’s renowned, most classically philosophical poems. Through a meandering walk in the woods, readers are introduced both to inviting romanticization and cold deception created by a beguiling winter scene. With its paradoxically starkly beautiful imagery, the poem describes the brightly everlasting “glint of setting sun on flint,” but also the relentless dark decay beneath the “bland masquerade” of snow. As the tone deepens, the speaker guides us further into the world beneath the surface, where “all faults are open.” We become subsumed in the dramatic “fire of rot and ruin” that are the once-concealed underpinnings of the poem’s winter imagery, as the wondrous lyricism struggles against the inevitable decomposition of the woods. Still, the final subtle shift (from “rot” to “riot”) in the poem’s heartening conclusion leaves us in a state of bemusement, as perhaps clinicians experience after visits with their silver-haired patients, forever asking “Is this not to be yearned for—riot and ruin,/the flaws of nature bared at last?”
