Testament

So, I'm permanently stooped and lop-sided, I can't walk in a straight line, and I'm a slow walker, though I could move much faster and maybe even run, but there is almost never any occasion to do either, especially to run.. Also I live in a world filled with a light fog that lifts only during the several hours just before dusk. I don't get enough sleep, I'm always suffering from several kinds of cold, my longtime favorite books are crumbling or fading into mere collections of blank paper or both, I can't eat steak for fear of choking to death, partly because it's been years since I had the last tooth that I was born with, songbirds are getting rare, the frogs over in the wet spot beyond the creek where I tried to dig a spring no longer announce that April is somewhere close, which means they must be already extinct, and  in the latest of five or six attempts in various eras, my memory yet again seems to be unwilling or unable to find  room in all its clutter for more than the first 215 or so of the 759 lines that comprise John Greenleaf' Whittier's still phenomenal 1866 poem "Snowbound."

Now what?

---------------

Note: The image that precedes this post is of one of my paintings, done in 1994.  It is called "Snow Pines,} and it is painted in acrylic and measures 19" by 24."  It shows a scene at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Two years after finishing it I donated it to a very cause.   Nevertheless missing it, as I have with every other painting that has gotten out of my hands, and also because I had it for such a short time,  I planned to paint another version, slightly different in some way, but of course, as with so many other things,  I've never gotten around to that..