Why reject the reverence

That makes this day,

This day,

More holy than yesterday or

Tomorrow?

If your birthday is just a number,

Aren’t birthdays mystical as well?

When Pythagoras sat cross-legged

Looking out at the Ionian Sea, 

Listening to the inaudible symphony

Of a mathematical universe,

When Cardano encountered 

The square root of negative numbers,

When Euler’s Identity theorem

Showed the elegance

Of the unit circle in the complex plane,

They touched the other world;

Where the horseness of horses

Trot in outline form 

Across golden fields,

Where ratios roll around

Like lopsided toys

Played with by children of the gods,

Where transcendental numbers 

Gush from the ground

In an infinite stream 

Of non-repeating figures

Like the genetic code of the universe,

Where on the day of their birth

They dance,

Hand in hand,

Before they were born

In the green fields of eternity.

When you say every birthday 

Is like Goya’s Third of May,

Before you think of being executed by a firing squad,

Don’t you remember feeling beknighted

When you were five, birthday crown

On your head, plastic sword in hand,

Aglow with magical powers?

Do you remember turning ten?

Inhabiting the power of double digits,

How all nine-year-olds suddenly looked

So young and puny?

Thirteen felt odd,

Like a shipwreck survivor

In a prime double-breasted suit,

Landing on an island

After drifting for months at sea.

A welcome party wrapped you in prayer shawls,

As you chanted from their sacred scrolls,

And after, became a man.

Nineteen, expanding with possibilities 

In all directions,

You stood on Commonwealth Avenue,

Your eyes gleaming jade,

Seeing the world 

Architected in verse.

At twenty-two, you realized 

You are way too young 

To be working until ten at night,

Staring out across an empty trading floor 

In Salomon Brothers, 

Seven World Trade Center,

The City, dazzling in the background

And your future somewhere, 

Out there.

At twenty-seven, you stood in the courtyard 

Of the Cat & Fiddle, 

Lighting a cigarette, wearing your first sports coat,

Discussing Tarantino with a chatty redhead,

Living through the myth 

Of Hollywood.

At thirty-three, you decided to get serious about love.

No more fantasies of harams,

No more drunken pontifications over

The nature of time at the Coach & Horses,

With your arms slung around two brunettes.

No more dead-end dating,

Waking up far from home

In the back seat of your Honda CRV,

Turned inside out.

At thirty-five, you were seared into eternity,

Walking into the light of the aisle,

Turning seven times around your beloved,

Passing through the transoms 

Of marriage, family, and home,

Exhausted and scared out of your mind,

Putting all your trust 

In that light.

Turning forty felt like hovering 

Over a watershed, 

Experience, like mountains 

Squeezed into the folds of a brain,

Where you could feel time flow 

Down one side 

Fracturing into images,

Down another side, experience branching off 

Like forked lightning.

When you were fifty-three, 

After being winded helping your son move into his apartment,

A doctor told you your mind thinks you’re young

But your body is old,

And it was the first time someone called you old

And you believed it.

Turning fifty-seven,

You worked all night,

Peering out from the glass office on the thirty-eighth floor,

Staring into the lights of the City,

Until both your life and the City

Blurred into one.

The morning you turned sixty

You sat in your running car

In the driveway, 

Staring through the windshield,

Falling through fear, 

Pulled down into the chasm

Of dark shadows, reminding you

Of your father’s grave before

His casket was lowered into the

The cool dark earth.

Sixty-five felt momentous 

But you can’t remember why.

Napping became your religion,

As the decades started to pass 

Like uneventful afternoons,

When you woke up at seventy-seven

Unsure if it was morning or evening,

Unsure if you had plans for brunch or dinner,

Unsure which state your children live in

Or how old their children are.

When you turned eighty, everyone came.

Your sons gave speeches,

And sitting in your wheelchair

You grabbed a fried calamari

From the tray of a waiter passing out hors d’oeuvres,

Even though you knew you couldn’t eat it

With your stomach recently sealed

With a feeding tube, as you swallowed

The calamari, like an Abyssinian gulping down a canary,

Looking up innocently with a yellow tail

Hanging from your mouth,

Swallowing the calamari because it was your birthday,

And it was your party, swallowing the calamari

To reclaim your power over your body,

To thumb your nose at the plague,

To revel in the freedom of a free act,

Consequences be damned.

At eighty-three, you fell in love,

Giddy as you were at nineteen,

Staring off, enraptured by the thought

Of being in love, amazed to be 

This happy, this late.

Reflecting on your ninety years,

Sipping a glass of Maker’s Mark,

Trimming a cigar on the front porch

In Southern Virginia;

The Applichians shimmering 

Like a multi-colored copperhead 

Coiled into ancient ranges,

Humming in low murmurs,

The October mist and quiet

Extending blessings, blessings,

Blessings.

Ninety-five felt like being one year younger than dirt.

Your body, just a sack of skin and bones

Like a bag of Lincoln Logs,

Exposed clavicle and brain stem,

Eyes as fragile as a pug,

Sitting on a stool waiting, waiting,

Waiting.

And then came the reverence

Of turning ninety-nine,

As the world turns to look at you 

Peering into your inscrutable eyes, peering

Into an inscrutable past,

Where they can touch a century 

By holding your thin, fragile hand,

When all the abstractions of a number

Come down to earth

Like starlings roosting

In a laurel tree,

When all the pain and stories

Are written across your palms,

When all the bells begin to ring in celebration

And the opportunity to allow joy

Into the world opens

Like an outstretched hand,

We hold hands and dance

In the green fields of eternity.