IN HIS OLD AGE: DEEMER AT 3:17 A.M.

(review by Bob Hicks)

So this is the way it gets.

Lying in bed awake 

at 3:17 a. m.

my wife’s heavy breathing 

the weight of the dog on my leg 

I am visited by the ghosts 

of past mistakes 

and dance to a symphony of regrets 

I wouldn’t change a thing 

This is who I am 

counting my blessings 

in the dark morning

That’s Portland writer Charles Deemer’s poem The Bottom Line, from his new collection In My Old Age, just out from Round Bend Press. Those of you who follow Deemer’s bracing, political, personal, sometimes crotchety blog The Writing Life II will remember a while back when poems started poking out, almost on their own, as if demanding voice among the general background noise of sports rants and teaching woes and struggling with scripts and ramming one’s head against the broad national venality and extolling the virtues of a simple cup of coffee and a good plate of scrapple in the morning. Old men, Deemer has discovered to his delight, get to say and do pretty much what they like, or at least what they’re still capable of saying and doing. This book is the result of that irascible fit of creativity, and I, for one, am happy for it.

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