What I Didn’t Do During My First Year of Retirement

Grow our my hair and beard
and parade up and down Holly St weekly
in neon colored tunics
carrying a sign warning about the coming apocalypse

Memorize Robert Pinsky’s volume of poems to read aloud
and go to the torn down mills site
reciting them weekly in a voice that vibrates with
the gulls and rusting rocket-like silos

Go to every major league ballpark
and stay long enough to sit through the national anthem
while carrying a sign with a quote by Borges
“poets, like the blind, can see in the dark”

Open up a small bookstore in an out-of-the-way basement office space
and change weekly the order of
how the publications merge in various piles
of animal sculptures

Reduce my what will I do list
and cross off the penultimate possibility
leaving a final and ultimate descriptor
of how I will spend my time until the last line is erased

One thought on “What I Didn’t Do During My First Year of Retirement

  1. I love this whole poem but this stanza has to be my favorite

    Open up a small bookstore in an out-of-the-way basement office space
    and change weekly the order of
    how the publications merge in various piles
    of animal sculptures

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *