Diverse Discombobulations

You see a human body
Like that, slowly decaying,
But not yet blasted, not bare

Bone, still moldering with thoughts
Munching tatty memories,
Don’t assume it’s a wasteland,

Not yet. The elderly bear
Up under double burdens—
Failings of memory and

Expectations of wisdom—
The elderly minds, that is.
Forget wisdom. What they have

In the slow fires underground,
Wet burning peat and compost,
Is a new diversity,

A late diversity, strange
Little, unclassified thoughts
With multistage life cycles,

Boring minor holes in soil,
Larding them with detritus
Left by big ideas’ collapse.

An old mind can surprise you,
Not with wisdom or recall
Of lost worlds from a childhood,

But with some small moth idea,
That, for instance, all of you
Are twin selves’ refugia,

And when you forget your name
It means that you’re beginning
To remember your other.