Quinquagenarian

The month I turned fifty, I ate pear and violets, 
a milk-soaked custard cake. On the waterfront, 
a lesser egret devoured her supper, fishy slivers 
of finning light out of the bay where the river 
mingles with the sea. I drifted far as the market 
where lavender soap wedded to dewy beeswax 
melted in the winter rain, making the smallest 
they’d ever been since their days of lye and ash. 
How ruthless we were when young, the rushed 
days sweeping lovely eelgrass on the shoreline, 
soles pounding all the way to the wrecking surf 
and back. I stood with the gravity of a blue heron 
on a good leg at low tide, grateful for the hour. 
She feels things stirring where no one else sees 
the beaver moon, so-called because of the season 
when they start hibernating in their reedy homes 
during the last full moon of the winter solstice. 
I’m fifty years old. Even learned a word for it, 
a quinquagenarian. Here’s an anthem for this: 
a hard frost, the wick-wick of marshland reeds, 
a nerve singing in a molar underneath a crown 
thanks to inflammation, my stiff right shoulder, 
moods, impulses, and hooks that will rip a soul 
now mercifully abating with the receding tide 
while our memories pass through like weather. 
The love of Christ isn’t dished out to sinners 
on spoons but shed abroad by the Holy Spirit. 
And I wonder, once upon a time, if I could tell 
my younger self, it’s all right—you’ll grow hair 
down to your waist. No one will say anything. 
You will compose all this in a poem one day. 
A woman named Edith who lives north of you 
on the little peninsula, a holocaust survivor 
who danced for her life in the death camps 
twice your age, one century in years, says, 
May we have peace in how we have lived 
And how we intend to live.