To Tamzen On Her Fortieth Birthday

By Ford, Frank Bernard

                Undoubtedly you'll get this
crap from others: Life begins @ 40 etc...you're not getting older you're
getting better - yeah all the Hallmark cliches showering down
                to spice the big day up.

                Right! Uh huh. (I hear
your edged voice) The heart at any rate

is not as clever as the cards; it knows itself
                moment by moment
                                in
love and in hate

is not as clever as the cards; it knows itself
                moment by moment
                                in
love and in hate

and in loneliness, despair, and joy. . .
so often also in that ravaging war within itself.

                Your blood plunges on to
its own beat, mocking time to let you taste a memory
more real than now, the memory of a child.

And I alone among your friends can speak to you, that little girl,
                about your Father's world, for
I have breathed                 the air of those same places,
like Kimpo Air Base                                 where
he must have touched down at the least,

                and where I stood in rain
that iced the brilliant spotlights to hear a shivering, incomprehensible Scot read
                my name from a list containing
many who would die.

                And I am twenty and could be
dead soon and am                 totally unafraid. I have money
for women and booze and yet, too, I want to get to Tokyo to stay alone in a hotel
that Frank Lloyd Wright designed, earthquake-proof,

floating on a sea of mud - and just to say I stayed there.
I love that wild and shy and scholarly young man
                both for his sins and his sweet
intents. And I embrace him as you must embrace yourself today.

I am twenty then,half your years,and if
                in the midst of a magic space
we meet, both at that age,and touch fingertips
to fingertips and stare

into each other's eyes,perhaps that selfsame magic
can extract some pain from the ensuing years

          and even bring your Daddy back to you
borne up by love on some pure sea of vision.

          I know. I know. Images crazy and fanciful. Get
real,           Frank! I invent your voice again. It stops me,
for           what it really says is never give your heart away.
          But it changes nothing. Our voices change nothing.

What sustains us is our power to love and nothing else.
Only that will take that grudge you cannot purge
from out your heart,those wry
distrusts.

Then will you float
lovely as you are
upon your life,
but not before.
When you are still
and know.

Then will you float
lovely as you are
upon your life,
but not before.
When you are still
and know.