His Idea of Winter Happiness

Huddled in a chair,

knees drawn up,

out on the porch,

arrested between forgetting and remembering,

all the Biblical span, its important fatuous adjectives,

fugitive selves and casual rebellious theatre

lived through,

now reduced, collected in a decrepit curl

in the chair,

(feeble interlocutory rage, brittle anatomy,

aloneness and old age silencing codes

threshing his decrepitude)

taking the sun

and warming, drowsily deploying

his own acquired twilight suns

that once lit up and

still cast a mournful, lambent flicker

on Bathsheba and Gabriel,

Ela and Atin.

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