Whatever it was it was
all leading up to
didn’t happen. Or did,

but smaller.

Not the page of the New Yorker
memorialized behind glass
with my name at the end of the poem.

Or the microphone, cold friend in my hand,

the sea of upturned faces,
my voice cast out—
changing everything.

Maybe there is no grand finale,

when the timpani
and cymbals have their moment.
Maybe the stories and symphonies were wrong,

and even sex and birth were a bit misleading

with their compelling rhythm,
rising action, come point,
birth scream—

Is this how it all turns out?

The body wilts around what shines
inside it. My hands become speckled
and bent like my father’s. Sometimes,

in the morning now, I have to use a cane.

Yesterday I forgot the name
of my street and some wise refrain
I used to teach. A scattering of poems remains.

But these days I am not so interested in thought

and the muscular acrobatics of the brain.
Something else that was always here –
as hidden as the sky – is laying claim.

What is it that shines through this withering?

Through the black hole in the center
of the mourning dove’s eye. Through the white space
around the fading letters of my name. Through these fingers,

tapping their marks, for a time, into time.

Each morning arrives with its allotment of breath.
From my rocking chair I can see the chickadees
at the feeder. The small triangles of their beaks

poke seed into each other’s mouths. I don’t know why.

They tip their black caps
this way and that. Their skinny legs
launch them into sky.

by Kim Rosen

I’ve shared the video of Kim Rosen saying this poem with a few elders in my life and they have all been touched. She has made an art out of learning and speaking poems by heart as explicated in her book Saved by a Poem. She knows how to embody and then transmit the truth of a poem straight to another heart.

I think Grand Finale is such a poignant ode to the profound human passage of aging. Starkly honest because, I guess, not seeing what is creepingly more apparent with each passing day, can be more burdensome than the relief of truth telling. She looks at the withering squarely. She looks at the dying promise of a grand finale with a clarity that somehow bequeaths nobility despite it all. Yet Kim also illuminates with her words, the glowing mystery of the mature heart. It’s as if a withering body, like threadbare cloth, becomes more likely to let the light through. How raw and beautiful.

‘The body wilts around what shines inside it’. This one line on its own is heartrendingly moving. ‘Something else, that was always here – as hidden as the sky – is laying claim’. This one invites for me an expansive surrender, a release of owning self in preparation for the final letting go perhaps.

And then at the end, the return to the sheer present as all there is. To the flutterings of the birds on the feeder, themselves a mystery in their activity. And those last lines – skinny legs – as frail as a worn-out body perhaps – become the delicate vehicle that launches us into the sky and the vastness beyond life.