I Dare You

We often think of old age as a terrible burden. The body’s growing decrepitude, the loss of loved ones, the decay of memory, all seem a great weight to bear. But counterbalanced to that is the lightness that age can bring, as many of the expectations that weigh us down when we are young begin to fall away. There can be a sense of greater reality, as well, as whatever oppressed or terrorized us when we were younger begins to shrink and grow transparent as we gain perspective. Moreover, age can bring courage. When you are young you fear death because you fear having your life taken away. The older you get, the less life there is to take. The immediate moment becomes your sole possession. Dorianne Laux writes about this in her latest book, Life on Earth. It is a “late book” from a master poet; as she hits her seventh decade, Laux writes with undiminished force. Like Yeats, or William Stafford, she is unafraid to tell us what it is like to be in the last phase of human life. Her poem “I Dare You” is a good example. The title references a time when she was a teenager and she jumped off a bluff into the ocean on a dare (she tells this story in her poem “Another Year on Earth”). In this poem, she is facing a different kind of cliff:

The ending is a bit ambiguous: does the couple laugh thinking of the past, or thinking of the cliff ahead? Perhaps both. But I like the laughter: it reminds me of Yeats’ “Vacillations,” in which he advises that we come “Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.”